Two weeks ago, I had an incredible stroke of bad luck. Nothing was ever that serious, but minor inconveniences and unfortunate happenings followed me around like a fever I couldn’t shake. The list of these inconveniences goes as follows:
I miss an email from my TA informing me that my 9 AM discussion section is online for the week, so I enter our empty classroom in confusion and have to join the Zoom call in said classroom and awkwardly apologize for being late;
I get a bad headache and take a nap to alleviate it, but it doesn’t work and results in me being late to dance practice;
I’m in a rush to get home when it suddenly starts thundering and pouring rain—my friend offers to drive me home, but running to her car gets us both drenched;
I rush home to do a friend’s vacation nails, but they end up being an hour late, so there was no reason to rush and get drenched;
My very irregular menstrual cycle decides to start two days before my very tropical, very beachy, very water-involved vacation to Cancun, even though I had just had my period 10 days ago;
At my internship, someone accuses me of lying about sending out the emails I was tasked with because they did not receive them, even though I most definitely did send those emails correctly;
My power goes out the same moment I’m supposed to have a meeting with with the same aforementioned TA, so I join her Zoom meeting late once again;
After joining this Zoom meeting, I quickly realize we were supposed to meet in person, not online, so I actually miss the meeting entirely;
I head to my next class shamefully, trudging through the heavy snowfall only to find out the professor decided to not come to class because of the snow, but neglected to tell us. She then gives us an assignment to make up for not having class, but makes it due 30 minutes after announcing it—with my bad luck regarding emails specifically, I don’t see this until the deadline already passed;
I forget that I was supposed to have this article finished a week ago (sorry Kaitlin);
And finally, the night before my early morning flight, I get home at 11 p.m. and realize I lost my keys. My friend who lives 20 minutes away finds them on her floor, so I wait 30 minutes for a shuttle to retrieve them. On the shuttle back, it’s past midnight and I’m the only passenger when my driver scares my soul right out of my body by muttering under his breath, “Why’d you get murdered?”
By this point, I am sick and tired of the games the universe has decided to play on me. But even more than that, I’m dreading that this bad luck is going to follow me onto my flight and stick with me through my vacation. Something almost always goes wrong for me when traveling is involved—either I forget something, or I lose something, or something is cancelled, or a horrible natural disaster overtakes my destination days before I go (last year, Palisades fire; I wish I were joking). My worries were only worsened when the BWI Airport completely shut down (the day before I lost my keys!) due to a chemical smell. But I tried to minimize any potential bad luck as much as I could — I religiously checked my bags to make sure I didn’t forget anything, checked to make sure BWI was running again and that my flight wasn’t cancelled, knocked on every piece of wood I came across and tried to manifest better luck by thinking of my unlucky streak as a way to get the bad vibes out of my system before I left.
In the end, whether it be the wood-knocking or the mindset change, something worked. The trip went entirely smoothly for me — nothing lost, nothing cancelled, nothing bad. It was nothing but a fun time filled with laughter, good food and beautiful scenery. Unfortunately for my friends, they encountered some back luck in the form of $60 water shoes, $70 swim trunks and some ill-timed lactose intolerance symptoms; I suppose they weren’t able to get the bad luck out of the way in time.
From now on, I’m going to stick with the concept that luck is like a video game health bar, and to replenish it I have to endure a bit of misfortune. It makes it easier to bear, knowing that luckier times will come soon.
Harmony Liu is a junior from Queens, N.Y. studying English. Her column shares moments in her life that feel significant and profound enough to be written out and cast to sea for any to find.
