You step into a murky casino filled with smoke of many colors. Expensive cigars, cheep cigarettes, pipes, hashish, cloves, marijuana, incense, opium, and then some. The combination of scents isn’t over-all not displeasing, just vivid. As people walk by, the swiftly moving ones leave trails of cleaner fresh air in their wake. Along with smoke there’s a grayscale of languages cluttering the air. It’s impossible to tell where one ends and another begins.
You wonder how you got here. Is this a dream? Yeah, that must be it, you can’t make out any of the signs on the walls and you’ve heard somewhere that one can’t read in dreams.
“Or maybe I’ve finally snapped.” you think. “The stress at home, stress at work, stress getting to and from home and work! It all finally got to me and I’ve fugued off to some place fun, just like I always joked.” This idea made you smile even though you know it shouldn’t, even though you know it’s not true. As you step forward into the gambling house a beautiful black woman wearing an elegant, and a tad revealing green dress walks past. Her dark eyes twinkled at you and she raises her glass to her mouth to hide her smile. She’s wearing long velvet gloves that match perfectly her gown.
“Yup, dream.” you think but smile back anyway. “of my wild youth.” Your next thought is naturally of your significant other back home and you sigh.
The one-of-a-kind sound of a ball being injected into a roulette wheel turns your head and derails that train of thought. You see all the people over there, cheering and drinking, laughing and hugging, and decide that it’s time to find your table. The sound of dice rattling in palm and striking with merciless precision echoes in your ears. Cards were always more your game and for some reason that thought too brought yet another smile to your lips. You must be having a good day, that’s three and you just got here.
You can feel your eyes beam as they follow legs as far as they could up into the red dress of the girl carrying around the drinks filled with the red liquor. Her long red nails clicked against the bottom of the tray. Her red lips asks if you’d like a drink. Even though you can’t really hear what she’s said you get her meaning, smirked, set your empty one on the tray with a clink and take a fresh one. “How many of these things’ve I had?” you wonder. “Maybe that’s the problem.” A roar went up from the crowd gathered around a little table over in the corner, a man in a blue suit, and a blue hat just won something, collected his winnings, and walked away so satisfied that his blue shoes seemed not even to touch the ground.
You’ve never been much of a gambler, or at least never very good at it, but still you walk up to a table that has an opening. Just to see what all the excitement is about, of course. The dealer has a very white shirt, teeth, hair, an old woman with almost translucent skin to match. She nods and smiles politely at you and mumbles something that you can’t quite discern over the din. You know there’s only one thing a card dealer would be asking in a casino. “Oh no. No, thanks.” you answer reflexively. “I’m not feeling quite right.” The excuse sounded lame to you so you add more words. “And I don’t think I even know what game we’re playing.” you say with a forced little laugh. Her old spindly fingers put their cards down and slowly reach across the cloth tabletop and land on your shoulder. As curious as you are uncomfortable you lean in to put your ear a little closer to the card-woman’s mouth.
“All that you can do, is done. Now the rest is up to chance. And when it comes down to it, no matter how you play them, games are always left up to chance.” Even after she released her gentle hold, for a moment you’re to baffled to lean back.
You look around the room and try to figure out if you’re confused or not. In the end you decided that your elder must be right because you feel equally hopeless/full about all the tables. They’re all just games of chance. “Why not.” you hear yourself say. On average you aren’t much of a risk taker but what the hell, what were you there for if not to live a little.
With one fluid movement the old card-thrower scoops her deck off the green felt and shuffles them in an almost magickal way. She seems to have thousands of cards dancing through her wrinkled hands. With one final swooping motion she spreads them out across the green and makes a wave roll through them back to front, and front to back almost revealing what the cards are, but never quite. Right when you think she’s about to deal you your hand they were snatched up and they were pirouetting around the card jumbler’s fingers once more.
As you watch the shuffler shuffle you feel your heart drumming against its bone cage as if it’s trying to escape. You try and ignore the sensation by talking over it, so you say the first thing that comes to you. “You look like you should be in a magic show or Something… You know, instead of just flipping cards.” Hearing your awkward clumsy words makes you feel all the more uncomfortable. The just-a-card-flipper flashes her white, toothy grin and spreads all the cards out in her hands about a foot away from your face in that ‘pick-a-card, any-card’ sort of way. You stare blankly and self-consciously until the ancient one nods at you. Hesitantly you reach and choose.
You flip it over and see what you chose. 220699. The fog seems to lift. It means the twenty-second day of June, nineteen hundred and ninety nine. Illumination. Each card represents one day of your life.
The particulars of it aren’t important but somewhere and somehow along the way you’ve died and that one card/day you just chose at random was now going to be where you were going to spend your eternity. You rack your brain trying to recall if that particular date was a good one or a bad one for for you. You desperately hope that you made the most out of it.
Yes, in the end it all came down to a certain amount of chance, but at least you had been given the ability to stack the deck in your favor.
So why didn’t you?
You were never able to have a perfect life but at least you could’ve tried your damnedest to make every day one that you wouldn’t have minded repeating.
