Some people are built on fault lines. Not cursed or doomed, but perpetually off, like fruit that rots from the inside before the skin even bruises. You know the type: the ones who always pick the grocery cart with the wobbly wheel. who fall in love with ghosts, or worse, with people who might as well be.
Science calls it probability. Poets call it tragedy. I’d call it “watching a vulture circle overhead since birth, waiting for me to stop moving long enough to be interesting”
Misfortune isn’t personal. The universe doesn’t hate you. Hate requires attention, and you, like all of us, are wallpaper in the cosmic hallway. A crack in the plaster. A flicker of light in a room no one enters.
I think of luck as a currency. Most get a steady allowance; enough for small joys, the occasional miracle. Others win the lottery young, burning through their fortune before they learn compound interest. But us? We’re given just enough to tease what could’ve been. A scholarship revoked over a clerical error. A pregnancy test flashing yes the same week the doctor says malignant.
The Greeks called it ate: the blind ruin sent by the “gods”. Not malice, but divine distraction. You can survive a tragedy, for it has edges, a shape to grip. But rotten luck is slow. It’s the job offer that arrives after you’ve signed a lease in another city. The love letter discovered in a drawer, decades too late, ink faded into ghosts. The way your cat waits until you’re finally happy to die in your arms on a tuesday afternoon.
The cruel joke?
We’re wired to narrativize suffering. To dig for meaning in the rubble. But sometimes, The landslide is just geology. The tumor is just cells. The love letter was lost, not hidden for dramatic effect, not waiting to be discovered by some future archaeologist of your loneliness. Just…gone.
Worst of all, it disguises itself as your own fault. You should’ve checked the fine print. Should’ve called sooner. Should’ve known. The universe winks as you carve yourself open looking for the flaw.
But here’s the secret:
The fruit was always meant to rot.
The cart was built to wobble.
Luck isn’t a tide. it’s static on a dead channel.
And you? you were never the exception. you’re just here to listen.