Just My Luck...

I am not a risk-taking person.

I drive the speed limit and wear my seatbelt. I dislike most roller coasters and thrill rides. You think you’re going to convince me to bungee jump? Have fun with that endeavour. Planes make me nervous.  I open boxes of mangoes carefully and check for black widows and scorpions. I swim in the shallow end.  I don’t step on the cracks in the sidewalk because, well, you just never know. I usually hit the remote lock button on my car about 6 times, and I don't walk under ladders. I don’t put my money in risky investments, I dread wearing spike heels, and I’ve played poker only once in my lifetime, loathing every minute of it. Jaywalking makes me feel like a veritable badass motherf***er.

Those adrenaline-pumping, thrill-inducing, heart-pounding activities that seem to exhilarate others only seem to succeed in making me feel ill and dizzy. While others are lining up for round two, I’m stumbling around on legs made of jelly and wondering if I’m in the early stages of a heart attack.

However there is one area of my life in which I’m forever chasing unlikely possibilities, venturing into the great unknown, and betting all against all odds. This area my friends, is the utterly retarded state of twitterpation some people refer to as “love”.

When I meet someone and they lean in for that all-important first kiss, I’m like a skydiver hanging off the edge of the plane. I let go without a second thought. I don’t even check if I have my backup parachute. If a certain guy squeezes my hand I do a backflip off a diving board twenty feet high, having not the slightest clue whether the water is hundreds of feet deep or two inches shallow.  When it comes to love I could have the worst hand possible and still be all in, just because I thought I saw a twitch or a smirk on his handsome face. He whispers softly in my ear and smiles, and suddenly I’m burning all the lifeboats on deck and dancing in a circle around the flames, or just chilling with some metal poles in a thunderstorm.

I would love to say it’s glamourous and edgy, like those brilliant men you see in movies winning back thousands in a single evening against all odds, throwing down their cards at the end with just a sly smile of understated, sophisticated triumph.

It isn’t. 

I’m more like the guy who gets roaring drunk at the community fair and spends his whole paycheck on over half the fifty-fifty tickets…and loses to someone who just bought one.  Or that broken man in a worn out suit, still sitting at a blackjack table at three a.m., shamelessly weeping because he just lost everything. I always forget the odds are never in my favour. Several billion to one, in fact.

I don’t want to end up one of those wizened up, creepy old women, deathly figures in a haze of cigarette smoke, their skin creased with disappointment and hard living, melting into the seat in front of a VLT machine.  They waste away there like souls in purgatory, feeding in their coins again and again because they won twenty bucks two years ago and they know, they just know that surely this time they’re going to win the grand prize, and everything will be perfect. No, I don't want that to be me.

I think it’s finally time for me to cut my losses.

Gentlemen, I fold.