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My lucky number used to be 11. It’s not anymore. It’s funny that there was ever a time in my life that I thought I had a ‘lucky’ anything.
The first sport I played was soccer. It was my mother’s choice when I was 5. I think I talk like we never spoke a day in our lives– she wasn’t very present, that’s true, besides in the times of screaming and fighting that I don’t want to remember, but that doesn’t mean she was invisible altogether. I guess it’s important that I clarify that.
She wanted me to play soccer because she’s Columbian, and that makes me Columbian, and I agreed because I was, like, 5 and wanted to kick a ball. She chose my first ever jersey number– 11. I never wore a jersey with a different number, except that one summer league where Knight and I were playing baseball, and he took 11 because he got there first and wanted to spite me. I beat him up after I found out, but he still didn’t give me the jersey back. I’ve hit Knight several times throughout my life. More than he ever deserved– but that time, I think he did deserve it. At least he hit me back.
I liked 11 because I thought my mother liked 11. It was probably just a random number. She probably just picked up the jersey she thought would fit me best. I don’t think she cared about the significance of 11 at all, and yet it became the most significant number in the world to me. She wasn’t there to see my 11th birthday. It should have been the best day of my life, turning 11, but it wasn’t. I was sad because my mother had left me. That was the first time that 11 had started to sour. Yet, I persisted. All throughout high school, in what I call my ‘golden days’, I wore the number 11 on my back. I never told anyone why. I don’t tell people a lot of things.
. . .
“So, what have you been up to?” Wind Archer had asked me in the car on the way to Shadow Milk’s house. “I feel like I haven’t seen you much lately. I know I’ve been busy, and I’m sorry for that… I’ve been wanting to catch up.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. He was here on a short weekend trip because he’d finally found the time– he was really busy with school, he always was. I didn’t know how to tell him that I’d been really busy, too, for the past three months. I didn’t know how to tell him that I was just in Michigan at the end of October and didn’t tell him. I didn’t know what to say at all.
“Nothing really,” I said, a complete and total lie. I had been up to my ears in shit lately. This was actually the first time I had even been to see my friends in a couple weeks; they were holding a get-together that day just to celebrate the fact that Wind Archer was there, because I made them into the kind of people who did that sort of thing. Continuing like a liar, I said, “Just… been chilling since graduation.”
“You deserve to rest,” Wind Archer said, unbeknownst to the fact that I hadn’t rested in a while. “Have you thought about getting a job?”
“Uhm,” I said, moving my hands on the wheel awkwardly. The answer was yes– yes, I had. I’d applied to several ‘real’ jobs, with the best resume I could muster on my own (though it was incredibly lacking). Business, business, business, everything my father had always wanted me to do, the thing I had just gotten a degree in from Princeton. But I wasn’t applying to appease my father, even if she would have thought I was. I wasn’t even applying to try and impress Wind Archer, to finally have a ‘real job’ to match his mind-blowing intelligence and accomplishments. Again, lying through my teeth, I said, “I already have a job that pays.”
“That’s true,” Wind Archer nods. I don’t remember what he was wearing that day. I think I’m supposed to remember every detail, but I don’t. It wasn’t about him at all. “I don’t want you to think that I don’t respect the work you do now, with your videos and such. I respect you a lot.”
“Thanks,” I said simply. At the time, I didn’t really agree with him. I was set on getting a real job. I’d also applied to jobs I was overqualified for, like bartender and front desk jobs. I hadn’t told anyone but my father that I had been applying. It was one of the many little secrets that were quickly accruing. I couldn’t explain to people why I was so eager for a secure, annual salary, and so I just kept it to myself.
“Are you happy?” Wind Archer said randomly, turning to look at me. Usually, when I describe Wind Archer, either in the past or present or just in the walls of my mind, I have a million details to tell you that I noticed because I loved him. I am affectionate about everything he does, and it reflects in my language. In this memory, though, there is no affection. There is no joy in any part of this memory. When he came at me with his question, blunt as he always was, I am sure that at the time I found it endearing and lovable. Looking back, though, I see it factually, objectively. Wind Archer was in the passenger seat of my car, and I was driving, and he turned to me and asked me a question in the same way he always did. It is not significant to me.
I thought about his question for a moment. I don’t remember exactly how I felt at the time, I don’t remember distinctly what the joy I was feeling that morning was like, but I know that I must have thought about his question and felt something positive, because I smiled and responded truthfully, “...Yeah, actually. I think I actually am.”
I don’t know if he was asking me about my job or my life, or something else entirely, but he must have liked my answer, because he smiled and turned to look out the window. He always liked to observe New York City, like it was just another ecosystem for him to study. I think I was truly happy then, in an unconventional way. My life was out of control and chaotic, but I had felt at that moment like I was starting to get a grip on it. I had smiled under the notion that I was very happy with where I was, even if it wasn’t where I had planned to be.
“Look,” He said suddenly, reaching over and tapping my car clock with his long finger. I looked over to see that the clock read 11:11. “Make a wish.”
And so, I did. I always wished for the same thing, unbeknownst to him– every time I made a wish, I wished for Wind Archer. I had been doing that since I was very young. Occasionally, though, I would wish for something else. This was one of the days that I did that– I silently made a wish, one that never came true. Sometimes, when I need to put the blame on something other than the truth, I think that wishing for what I wished for is what made everything fall flat on its face.
Naively, then, I said, “Today is going to be a good day.”
. . .
I was really happy when I found out that people wished on 11:11. I remember it was Moonlight who told me when we were 12, on 11/11/11, a monumental day. She and I always liked to wish on things. She, though, always said her wishes out loud. I always kept mine to myself.
I liked to wish on dandelions, on eyelashes, on stars, and on birthday candles. When I found out you could wish on my favorite number, too, I became obsessed with it. If ever an 11:11 came by that I didn’t wish on, I felt it was bad luck. I cared a lot about superstitious stuff like that, even when my dad called it dumb and girly.
I usually wished for Wind Archer to love me the way I loved him. I wished for that about 90% of the time. Sometimes, though, there would be times I would wish for my mother to come back, or wish to be dead, or wish to finally stop being in pain. I never ever got what I wished for. Wind Archer was the only thing that ever came true.
I don’t wish on 11:11 anymore. I do my best to turn away from the clock when I know it’s coming up. I wish I could say that there are days when I don’t think about it, but there really aren’t. The only thing that fully distracts me is being under the one wish that ever came true, so stimulated that no other thought could possibly worm its way in.
I still wish on other things, like candles and eyelashes, because there’s a sick part of me that thinks that wishing will do something, like if I just find the right shooting star, everything will reverse and be okay. But I don’t wish on 11. It’s not my favorite number anymore. I can’t even stomach looking at it some days, days when I feel like a dead man walking.
. . .
I got to be happy for about two more hours past 11:11 before my world ended.
I always say that– that my world ended. It’s funny, because I feel like time has stopped moving since that day, that I haven’t been the same person since, that I was stuck with my feet in cement. I felt like ivy had grown over me, that I was becoming one with the moment the skyscrapers fell and the universe combusted, that I was decomposing in the rubble– and yet, the world keeps moving around me. Sometimes, I hold my hands up in front of me, palms facing away from my face, and push as hard as I can… as if I could stop the world moving by doing that. I do a lot of things that are fucking stupid. My world ended that day, and nobody even knew. Sugarfly told me that there is a ‘significant strength in the pain you can manage to hide from the world’.
Does it make me strong to suffer? In a way, I hope it does; I hope that my suffering can finally become something tangible, since the root of my suffering is intangibility, is the lack of a feeling in my hands. Is there a strength in dying and then continuing to live on as a zombie? Is there strength in keeping the color in your skin, in keeping your eyes bright, in keeping your walk steady so that the living around you don’t know you’re already dead? If there is, perhaps I’ve won the competition, perhaps I’ll get another prize that will shatter me. Perhaps I’ll take that prize and sit it on my shelf and imagine like it has the ability to heal the wound that bleeds eternally.
When we arrived at the brownstone house in which I loved like it was my own, Sugarfly was quick to run up to me and tell me, “Do you know what day it is today?”
“Yes, darling,” I said, and received her excited figure in my arms like she was my wife, accepting the kisses she planted on my cheeks graciously. Sugarfly is the only person in that house who I can clearly remember, who held any significance that day. She was shining in yellow, in the way that she always did, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Her hair was in pigtails tied with white ribbon, and she had stockings that went up her full thighs. She looked youthful, childish– and yet she was motherly to me, sisterly, loving and caring and doting like I wasn’t three years her senior. I specifically remember her hair, her blonde hair, in a way that haunts me. It haunts me because I love it so much, and because every time she has worn pigtails since, I have not been able to meet her eye. But she understands, and does not force me to see her and in turn see what I am simultaneously running toward and away from eternally.
“It’s eleven eleven!” Someone said. I couldn’t tell you who said it. I don’t remember– I cannot picture anyone’s face that day, except in vague outlines. I don’t even remember who was there. Again, shouldn’t I? Shouldn’t I remember every detail, down to exactly what time a gnat flew past my nose? Part of me aches to remember every detail, like knowing every part will reward me with closure, like remembering will help me find a way to rewrite it. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot picture what their faces looked like that day.
“I hope you wished on 11:11,” Sugarfly had said. Her low-top converse sneakers were the same powder, baby blue of my shirt. I was wearing a button-up, which was so unlike me and much more like Black Sapphire, who I had been trying to model myself after. I had gone on a spree and bought a bunch of clothes that made me feel more adult and professional and grown. I’d rolled the sleeves up just like he did, popped the collar and unbuttoned the top nearly halfway in an attempt to make the shirt feel more like me and less like a costume. I never wore that shirt or any of the other ones I bought again after that day. “It must be even more powerful today of all days. Oh, I hope you didn’t miss it!”
“He didn’t miss it,” Wind Archer said. “So whatever he wished for must come true, right?”
And I smiled, and so foolishly I smiled, and I could just cry at the thought of how truly I smiled– I smiled, I smiled, I smiled, and I was so joyous, and all felt well in the world, and I said, “I really fuckin’ hope it does,” and went on for a couple hours with the wholehearted belief that there was simply no way that my life could not go as I wanted. It wasn’t even a possibility, and if you had been in my place, it wouldn’t have been a possibility to you, either.
A couple hours later, I got the call, and I knew immediately that something in my life would be ruined, like a sixth sense. I got a call from a number begrudgingly saved in my phone for the sake of having it, from a number that had never needed to call me. My voice stopped when I saw it, mid-sentence, and I stepped away from the conversation I was in and took the call, stepping out back to the porch for privacy. This moment I remember like I remember what I did 5 seconds ago– I remember each visceral and raw emotion I felt. I remember the exact cadence of the voice on the other side, I remember the way my hand rose to cover my mouth, I remember the way my body felt like it was going to collapse any second. I hope you can understand that I can’t describe it to you. I cannot repeat this feeling or what came after it to anyone, for I fear it might kill me.
What I can say is that I ran inside and started to pack up my things, and I don’t remember what anyone said to me except to Sugarfly, who asked me in a hushed tone what was happening, and in one sentence I told her, because that was all I needed to say, and she understood.
“I’ll come up with an excuse,” She said, and sent me out the door, not needing me to thank her. I rushed out to my car, without turning back, but I knew she was closing the door shut, with her blonde pigtails and white ribbon and powder-blue shoes. I didn’t look at the clock when I drove, but the time 1:11 must have passed while I was in the car.
. . .
I have an odd relationship with God.
I grew up Catholic, specifically Spanish Catholic. I think that Catholics are supposed to be stricter than Christians, but I don’t think I grew up too strictly religious. We went to Church about one Sunday of every 3 that passed, we stopped eating meat on Fridays for lent, and celebrated Día de Reyes, or Three King’s Day– but we didn’t pray every day, and we often forgot to say grace, and we didn’t do any of the other traditions that I’m sure I don’t know about.
Religion was something that didn’t rule my life, but was always present in the back of my mind, mostly because of my father. I don’t think I’ve ever opened a Bible, and I didn’t do communion, but I was baptized as a kid and wear a cross around my neck everyday, and I pray to God when I feel like if I don’t, I’ll be hopeless.
Do prayers count as wishes? Does tapping the sign of the cross onto my forehead, shoulders, and chest and then folding my hands in prayer count as wishing? When I pray, are my words sent off to the same place my wishes go? I don’t have an answer, and I also don’t know what I believe.
After my parents got divorced, we stopped going to the Catholic church. Holding my father’s hand, we walked into some contemporary Christian church, and I remember how shocked I was at the change in format. There was no stained glass, there was no beautiful altar, there was no one on their knees in prayer. Instead, they sang a concert of worship and had a big projection screen.
I asked my father why we were there, and she told me it was because Catholics don’t like divorce. I asked him where the babies got baptized and where they did confessional, and he told me he didn’t know. He was as new to it as I was, but when you’re 10 and your mom has just left you and you want the comfort of God and baby Jesus to hold you like they can fix what’s broken, you want your father to have all the answers. But she didn’t.
My father was 23 when he had me, and I was barely born in wedlock. That’s all I have to say about my father right now.
When I was 23, I went back to the Catholic church. I sat in confessional and I cried, and I cried, and I cried. For about a year, I went almost every Sunday morning to that church, and I prayed as if God could hear me and give me back what I had lost.
I don’t know if there’s a God. I think people who truly have faith have no doubt that he’s there. I don’t have an answer on what I do or do not believe– I just know that, when candles and coins in fountains fail me, and all I have is the spilling of my blood or the joining of my hands in prayer, I think it’s better to beg to someone that might not be listening, that might not even exist.
Is praying that different from wishing? Isn’t whatever you’re praying for a wish?
I wish almost every night for something that will never come true, shaking in my bed with my hands clasped and eyes screwed shut. God, can you hear me? God, can you save me? God, do you love me enough to take the world in your caring hand and spin it backwards? God, if I fear you enough, will you let me go back and save myself? God, why did you let this happen to me?
God does not respond, even if I send him 11 prayers at once.
. . .
When I finally got back to my car, I fell into the driver’s seat like a ragdoll, tears unable to stop streaming down my face. My eyes were wide, and I remember that I kept seeing birds flying past my car, and that it was cloudy out, and one of the clouds was shaped like a candy cane. I sat for a moment, staring out the front window of my car, before I brought my shaking hands up to the steering wheel and gripped it as if I was trying to strangle it, and I screamed and screamed and screamed.
I sat in the parking lot and I screamed and I yelled and I let my wailing wrack my body. Over and over I hit my steering wheel and my dash, slammed my head against the headrest, drove my fist into the console, tugged at my hair so hard I pulled a chunk out. I screamed “Fuck!” over and over and over, as if my emotions could do anything to help me. I was helpless and inconsolable, and all I had was my voice– and so I shouted until I barely had a voice to speak with anymore, snot running down my chin.
It’s funny that way, isn’t it? To wish all your life for something, then to have it and think to yourself, ‘I’ve just ruined my life’, then to lose it and know, ‘my life will never go on again’. That was the moment my life was sealed. On November 11th, my life was eternally sealed and laid to rest. And all I could do was sit and scream and cry about it. There was nothing I could do to change it in any such way. I clawed at my chest and clutched at my throat and rocked myself back and forth, as if anything I humanely could do had the power to stop the pain inside of me that, still, has not left me to this day.
In the middle of my anguished screaming, someone knocked on my window, and I turned to see a woman standing outside my car. I remembered then, that I was in the middle of the parking lot, and that everyone who passed me by could hear my screaming. I rolled my window down to apologize, stuttering and babbling over myself, but she shook her head to stop me.
“I just wanted to ask if there was anything I could do for you.” She was an older woman, with curly, auburn hair and tired eyes, and wrinkles around her mouth. She was wearing some sort of business suit, the kind made for women, with a skirt and a nice blouse that had a bow on it. She was tiny in stature and had rainboots on her feet. She was holding a bouquet of flowers in one hand. I can picture each flower perfectly, but I don’t know what kind of flowers they were. She came forward and put her hand on the door of my car, and her hands were sun-spotted and thin.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, trying to quiet the trembling of my bottom lip and the shiver of my body. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“You are not alone,” She said to me, and she had a raspy voice, but it was kind and full of love. She picked a flower from her bouquet and handed it to me, gently pressing it into my palm. The flower she picked was orange. “No one walks alone in grief.”
I’ve never quite known how to handle the word ‘grief’. I’ve never quite accepted it. It feels like, if I swallow that pill, if I accept the act of mourning, I’ll never be able to return from it. It feels like a statement of closure, a statement of finish, one I’m not ready for. I want the pain to end, yes– but if the pain is all I have left of something, does ridding myself of that pain mean I have lost the last bit of it? Grief, or in present tense, grieving. Am I grieving? Can you mourn a body that does not exist? Can you mourn a soul that will never be anything more than a bloodstain?
“Thank you,” I said to her, unable to say anything else, and I took the flower and held it to my chest. I couldn’t manage to smile, but she understood that, and she nodded. She didn’t smile at me, either.
She reached up and gently touched the cross that laid on my chest, fleeting yet full of depth. “God is with you,” she said, before turning and leaving me alone, walking to enter where I had just come from. I think about her constantly, and yet I will never see her again. She was just some woman who had the kindness to share in me what we must have been mutually feeling.
I don’t know why she walked into that hospital. I don’t know who her flowers were for. I don’t know what pain she was facing that day. She didn’t know mine, either, and yet she had the decency to see me suffering and come and show me kindness. Really, in that moment, I was just a child– and I had been wholly a child the entire experience– and the solace of an older woman coming to wish me well was, I think, the sole thing that kept me from driving my car directly off the nearest ledge. I wish I could do something for her, repay her for what she did for me. But life doesn’t work that way.
Once I felt I could see well enough to drive, I drove to the nearest gas station and bought a pack of Marlboro Reds, and smoked the entire thing by the time I finally had the guts to walk back into Shadow Milk’s brownstone house, a couple hours later in the dark. It was quiet when I got there, very quiet, and so on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in the year of the double-eleven, I had my first zombie-walk into a room of people.
Wind Archer was the only one there besides the family themselves, but I walked straight past him and everyone else’s questioning eyes and straight to Sugarfly, who looked as if she was staring at a ghost and gently took me to sit outside. And again, I cried and cried and cried in her arms, and she gave me the only real comfort I feel like I’ve gotten about the entire thing, because she’s Sugarfly and she always knows what to do. Sugarfly, who had been my sole confident; Sugarfly, who almost a decade after this, would get my wish. Sugarfly, the personification of womanhood itself.
“You will survive,” Sugarfly told me, even when I shook my head and told her I wouldn’t. In the end, she was right– I have survived every time. But why should I survive? What have I done to deserve that? And why would I want to survive when my life will bore into a ceaseless and eternal chase of a hopeless dream, an eternal run from a gripping nightmare? But it came from Sugarfly’s mouth, and I knew what she meant, and I knew she saw me, and I cried and cried and cried for everything that I will never have. When she told me she thought I should go home and rest, I looked up at her and saw her beautiful blonde pigtails wrapped in ribbon, an image I haven’t forgotten to this day.
When I finally walked back inside, staring at the ground to hide the tears I had obviously been crying from people who I really didn’t want to see, I told Wind Archer, who I had stranded at the brownstone house all day, that it was time to go. I don’t remember how anyone reacted, I don’t remember if anyone said anything, I just remember that I drove Wind Archer back to my apartment in complete silence. He didn’t try to ask me if I was okay, and when I silently walked to my bedroom and didn’t offer him the space in the bed beside me, he slept on my couch without question– and I sobbed myself to sleep on 11/11, at 11:11 PM, wishing I was alone in my apartment, wishing that my life hadn’t turned out the way it had.
. . .
There is a phrase, ‘if it’s meant to be, it will be’. People often use this to negate the concept of wishing. If the universe means it to be so, it will be so, and no amount of wishing or praying or hoping can change the will of the universe, can change the will of God.
I think that phrase is really, really fucked.
One time, shortly after the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when I flew home to break news I couldn’t break over the phone, after I had so shamefully recited words I could hardly get out, Knight, who has never and would never understand me, told me, “If it’s meant to be, it’ll be. This wasn’t meant for you.” He was trying to comfort me, but I felt that was an evil thing to say, and so I broke his nose. His son, his beautiful son with beautiful dark skin and beautiful blonde curls, was born with his sharp nose– and lives to be the only remaining version of the nose he had before I broke it.
If something isn’t meant to be, why does it exist in the first place? If something cannot come true even with all the begging in the world, why does God allow it to be dangled in front of you?
. . .
I am not a lucky person. Every mirror in my house has been shattered by my fist or by the impact of hitting the floor. I have never been lucky or gotten anything on the basis of having luck. I’m alive, aren’t I? And doesn’t that showcase just how misfortune I truly am?
Even as I hate the number 11 now, my old lucky number, now turned the bloodied, tragic number of my nightmares, comes back to haunt me every chance it gets. I see 11 everywhere, even more than I did before. 11 is everywhere– but my wishes are not. My wishes will never be present, will always be lost, will always be in vain, except for the man who holds my heart.
I cannot grace you with a good ending to this story because I have not gotten one. I cannot close this well. This is what I have to say about the number 11, my sworn enemy, and what I have to say about wishes and the universe and God and grief. That is all I have to say, all I can manage to strangle out of my lungs. Please excuse my abrupt ending– for all the endings I’ve gotten have been abrupt, and it’s all I’ve ever known. Amen.