Getting Lucky

by Daryl Banner

If Lady Luck was really a thing, I was certain that Lonely Loser was her bitchy gay brother, and he was damned determined not to let me enjoy the rest of my weekend.

“It’s all just a matter of which side of the street you’re standing on, isn’t it?”

“My life might be better with a guy who could … lighten things up.”

Recklessness felt freeing. Recklessness gave me strength, and assuredness, and hope for a major change in my fortune.

“Painful. Hurt. Yeah, I know. The worst wounds are the ones we can’t see.”

The truth Lucas unknowingly instilled in me was that every single person on the street had a story worth telling. It was so easy, so unassumingly easy, to forget the simple, obvious fact that homeless people were human beings, too.

you enjoy every pain and every pleasure, good and bad and all that lies between

Lucas is a drug I am irrevocably, irresistibly, uncontrollably addicted to, and I don’t ever want to stop.

“Your passion, Lucas. It’s right in here.” “In here?” “Your art.” My eyes detached from his. “Put all of that darkness somewhere,” he advised me. “You’ve learned from it. You are still learning from it. The trick isn’t to purge yourself of it, or to lament over how your pain is turning you dark; it’s to learn to live a little in that darkness and make it not such an enemy.”

“You are not like everyone else, James McKinney. You are not a man who people settle for,” he stated. “You’re a man worth fighting for.”

“No one gets to choose their family. And most of the time, your true family isn’t the people you’re related to by blood. Family sometimes just sort of … happens.”

“Sometimes we don’t get the closure we want. I think closure has to come from within us somehow. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying that sometimes … closure is a choice.”

“We have to choose to let them go—and truly let them go. We have to choose to accept the way things are, as if that is how they are meant to be, and nothing we do can change it. The only thing we can change is ourselves and what we do with this Rubik’s Cube of a situation. Just leave it a mess of colors and put it on the shelf.”

I think I felt a desire for him so desperate, it scared me. It scared me how much I was falling for him.

James was the kind of guy I was looking for all along, and I never even knew it.