No matter how many times I messed up at work, be it arriving late, disheveled, or irritable, her patience was endless. Her ability to love, a superpower. Not quite like the innate love of a parent, or the tried and true, give and take love of a best friend, because she was doing all the giving, and I was doing all the taking. No, the way that she loved me was actually somewhere between family and friend, a selfless combination of the two. It was more like an aunt.Aunt Monika.
With that perfect title follows the words that I have kept at arm’s length this entire past year:Aunt Drew.
Monika’s breath hitches. I must have thought out loud again. Now that I’ve started, I find it nearly impossible to stop. I repeat both phrases like a broken record.
“Aunt Monika. Aunt Drew.”
Each time that I say them, they grow like they are a tangible thing, and strengthen with each repetition, until they force a crack in the door that I was certain I slammed shut earlier with a sliver of shimmering light. The idea that I could be an aunt to my nephew, like Monika is to me, isright there.
A tiny beacon of hope, so close that I can taste its sweetness on my tongue.
I want to be in the baby’s life more than anything else, but the sobering fact remains that my curse is unbreakable. I have already tried everything I could possibly think of to free myself of it, with no success.
Monika starts to speak again as I sway unsteadily on my feet. I hear the words, but they may as well be in another language with how deeply I’ve fallen into my own sorrow. She repeats herself, but this time she holds me by my shoulders and brings her face within inches from mine.
“There are three hundred sixty-four other days in the year, Drew.”
I blink, bewildered, because even though I understand each word individually, the combination of them does not compute.
“You can still be in the baby’s life, because March thirteenth is justoneday. There are three hundred sixty-four other days in the year.”
Chapter eight
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
Mygutreactionisto laugh at the simplicity of her statement, but there is nothing funny about what she is suggesting. “You know better than anyone that I am unlucky all year long, Monika.”
She shakes her head. “See, that’s where I disagree with you. Today, yes. I can see how this particular day might be worth avoiding, but every other day of the year is free game.” I open my mouth to argue, but she quickly amends her statement to add, “Oh, and we can factor in Friday the thirteenths too. Just to put you at ease. I doubt there are more than a handful of those in a year.” She pulls her phone out of her back pocket.
“That’s a dangerous oversimplification,” I say. She ignores me to type something into the search bar. “There’s no telling when my curse will strike. It could be any—”
“Ah, see?” she says and holds her phone up to my face. “Google says that there are only an average of one point seven Friday the thirteenths in a year. Let’s be cautious and round up. We’retalking two Fridays a year, and your birthday. That’s it. The rest of the days are free for you to be an aunt to your future nephew.”
My shoulders rise and fall as I take an exasperated breath, but before I can start in on explaining for what may be the hundredth time that my bad luck peaks on my birthday, but still hangs around all year long, she cuts me off again.
“Also, before you stormed out of dinner, I wanted to tell you that I found a new way for you to break your curse that I think will actually work, and it’s something that you haven’t tried yet.”
I was completely checked out of this conversation and already preparing to say goodnight so that I could finally walk out the door, but her assertion holds me firmly in place while she searches for something else on her phone.
“Yes, here it is.” She holds out her phone for me to take.
I accept it, heartbeat spiking, but my hope is instantly dashed when I read the title of the article:Identity-Based Behavior:Change Your Life in One Simple Step!
“Hear me out,” she says, refusing to take her phone when I hand it back in her direction. “I had a feeling that you might react this way when Scott and Gabe finally matched with a baby, so I’ve been researching ways that you could start to see what we see, which is that you are not a danger to yourself or anyone else. In that research, I came across the concept of identity-based behavior change and did a deep dive into it.”
My quick glance over the article was more than enough to know that this silly idea will be no match for my affliction, and her continued insistence that I am not dangerous to be around is as exasperating as ever.
She presses forward, again, before I get a chance to shut the entire thing down. “The concept is simple. A person decides who they want to be, so in your case anuncursed Drew, and then starts living as if they are that person right away. No waiting for Monday, no watching for the stars to align before you start. Justshowing up, every day, by running each thought and decision through the lens of who you want to be, instead of who you currently are. It works like a snowball effect, where every tiny decision adds up to big results until you become exactly who you want to be. It’s brilliant, really. I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before.”
I shake my head in fervent disagreement but restrain myself from saying just how much I hate the idea, because she deserves my respect after everything she has done for me. “Maybe that could work for someone with smaller problems,” I start. “But my curse is not something that I wake up and have the option to choose or not choose every morning. It’s an extension of me that I have no control over.”
“That’s another thing that you and I disagree on,” Monika argues. “I think that you are so focused on looking for danger that your curse is actually nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. You are so busy anticipating bad things that you completely miss out on the good things that happen to you every single day, and what you focus on is—”
“What you attract,” I say, finishing her favorite saying with a grumble. I cross my arms over my chest.
“So, tell me if I am understanding you correctly. You want me to create an alter-ego,Uncursed Drew, as you called her, and then start living as her? AndUncursed Drew is going to be so wildly different from Cursed Drew that the shackles of my curse will magically fall off just in time for my nephew to be born?”
She narrows her eyes at my assessment. “That’s a very basic way to put it, but yes. If you start doing things that an uncursed person would do, like having friends, going out in public, and not living so small in general, paired with the mental change of looking for good around you instead of bad, I think it just might prove to you that you were never bad luck to begin with. Then,you can finally start to believe what we have been trying to tell you all along.”
