Against all odds!

„Life is always against all odds. At least a little bit.“
My witch sits on my windows sill and giggles. These truly were some witching words.
„How can it be only a little bit against all odds?“, I ask her and realize that the cookies in her hands were stolen from the cauldron in which I hide my emergency supplies.

I remember the first time these words came to us. It was a full moon in April 2020, when we had been drinking wine on a field all night, and I felt as if my world was spinning out of control.

„Well“, Layla begins her giggling response to my question. „Isn‘t it always frustrating when the stars do something so entirely different than the symbols on the back of your skull make you believe?“
I make a face at her.

The thing with the odds is messy.
Once life has reached the point were staring at the horizon and hoping for something or a someone to return is an evening ritual, a heart can wish for both things at once. It can wish for a thing to seem extremely unlikely to happen anyway.
To defeat the universe! For a glimpse of hope! For a violet sparkle, a rainy day in summer, or a cup of strawberries and cream.
But, if odds don‘t mean a thing, everything becomes terribly uncertain. The world may seem to fall apart. And most importantly: All the little odds this one thing might have had can also easily be taken away completely.

„What do you know about the odds“, I hiss at my witch as I see that my cookie cauldron really was completely empty again. „You died too early for some of the most interesting things.“
„Maybe“, she admits. „But I survived through singing next to my window, hoping that the right person with a rope ready might one day walk by.“

I once stopped singing because my mother found the thought amusing that I might wish to be discovered as a popstar. When I was 14, I looked back at my luck with boys so far and wondered if I would ever have a boyfriend (only to be first one in my friends group to have a serious boyfriend, which also did not make things any easier). I also stopped working at the theater, because I was terrified of all the moments when my work did not reach out to anyone. After finishing my first novel, I became so scared of never finding a publisher, I hid it from everyone. I even once stopped studying a subject that truly interested me, because I was worried about my odds of finding the kind of job that I would qualify for. When thinking about wanting children, I feel an odd sensation flowing through my body that there can be so many unknown things wrong with me for it to never happen.
And I spent the pandemic screaming at the horizon.

I don‘t do well with the odds in life.

„Maybe I would have never stopped singing, had I also realized how likely it was for me in this form to never be born“, I tell my witch, and I see a bit of sadness in Layla‘s face. She does not like this topic very much.

But still. My mother could have conceived a bit earlier or later. Would I be the same person? I could have been a boy. How much would that change? I could have not been born at all.

Life to start at all seems to be against all odds.

When I was 14, I wondered if anyone would ever want to kiss me. When I was 25, I wanted to only kiss this one person that was stuck behind the horizon and wondered if and how they would come back. Growing up does not always make things easier, but the kisses become more often and exciting. Maybe I really should sing again? My novel ever being published and in the shelf of a bookstore is not very likely, but the stuff my body is made of has traveled galaxies and avoided a miscarriage in the first trimester, so maybe there is some luck possible in this universe?

What if the asteroid bringing the elements needed for life to form would have missed earth? What if one of the great mass extinctions of the past would have been a bit too successful?

„One could think“, Layla slowly whispers, no, almost sings out into the night, „that simply by being alive, so many obstacles have already been overcome, there is almost reason for joy.“

Not just almost.
But my head still works best in the dark.
I still have a lot to figure out.