Abby reached over and turned off her alarm. She rolled over, pulling her comforter to her chest, not ready to get up and face a new day. A day of beige cubicles, meetings mired in minutiae and the endless petty slights of an overcrowded office. A day of struggling through crowded streets both pre-dawn and post-dusk only to lock the world away for too short a time before doing it all again.
And then she remembered: the drawing had been last night. The drawing for the record payout from the national lottery. Abby had forgone her morning latte for a week, her one daily luxury, in order to maximize her chances, taking them from ludicrously bad to ridiculously poor. Forty dollars had netted her twenty chances: two cheap slips of thermal paper stuffed into her purse replacing the pair of crisp twenties still warm from the ATM. Each slip with its matrix of randomly generated numbers rank with potential, promise, possibilities.
Turning back to the nightstand, she reached for her purse, blindly fingering through the debris until she found first her phone and then the two slips. She sat up, pushing her fingers through her hair and rubbing her eyes. A few taps on the phone screen took her to the lottery site which had the winning numbers blazed across the page. Abby slapped the phone face down on her lap before her eyes could register the information. She closed her eyes.
If she looked then it would all be over. She knew the chances. She knew that it was as good as impossible that she would win. Even beyond the statistics, she knew that she would not win. Not her. Not the girl who was always just good enough. Whose annual review was peppered with the words "dependable" and "solid" and "on time". Who got dates with the guys who were too insecure to go after the hot chicks. Who had received good supporting parts in the school plays, but never the lead. No. Abby did not win lotteries.
What she did do was dream. She dreamed of living somewhere with grass and sunlight. She dreamed of travel and sandy beaches and ocean waters the color of the sky. She dreamed of trying new things: foods, skills, adventures. She dreamed of doing these new things and knowing that it was okay if she failed. Okay that she could not play the guitar or write a novel or sing well. Nothing depended on her succeeding because she would still be able to pay her bills, still be able to eat, still have someplace with a bed to sleep in.
Abby knew that when she flipped the phone over and compared the numbers on the screen with her twenty sets of chances that the grass and the light and freedom to fail would all disappear. They only lived as long as she did not look. It was like something out of her dimly remembered "Physics for Poets" college class, that part where the professor had tried to get them to understand the impossibility of quantum mechanics. That thing where particles existed everywhere until they were actually observed. She felt that way about the tickets: they could still be winning tickets until she looked. Then it would all be over.
She looked at the clock and knew that she needed to get up, shower, eat something and get out the door or she would be late. She could not sit here mourning her not-quite-dead dreams any longer. Maybe that was the problem: she was not committing to winning the lottery. That was what all of the self-help, get-ahead, win-with-confidence books said. She needed to commit to success, to change her life as if she had already won. Quit her job, max out all her credit and know that she was going to win. She was going to lose because she could not commit to winning. Abby was dubious that that level of self-assurance worked on anything and certain that it did not work on statistical probability.
Abby closed her eyes, took a deep breath and turned the phone back over. She opened her eyes back up and scanned the numbers, comparing the six on the screen against those on the two slips. Then she closed her eyes again and tried not to fail. She still could not afford to.
