Essays - A Compilation

Lottery Ticket

I bought a lottery ticket today. It was not because I was feeling lucky. It was not because I had spare change. I bought a lottery ticket today. For the sheer feeling of owning a lottery ticket.

I had once read in a magazine that the chances of striking the grand prize with the lottery was around 0.0000005%. Many zeros. Many decimals. Far too many for me to mathematically comprehend. How lucky does one have to be to fit perfectly into that statistic? 0.0000005%. That’s 1 in 20 million people. 20 million people. If 20 million people met up on an empty field, would the mass be visible from space? Space. How much of space have we explored?

My thoughts drifted from one subject to another. Thoughts with no substance. Blank thoughts. I looked around my living room. Everything was right where I last saw them in the morning. The half-empty coffee cup sitting at the corner of the table. The magazines scattered across the floor. Yet, the room felt different. Not physically different, but different. Very different.

I looked down at the lottery ticket. 1, 2, 13, 19, 24, 32. Numerical figures. I tried to think of a logical pattern to connect the string of numbers. Multiples of 2? Factors of 32? Prime numbers? Nothing clicked. After an hour tirelessly attempting to decrypt a logical, mathematical pattern, I accepted the truth. The truth I had known from the start. The truth I had been avoiding. The numerical figures were just that - numerical figures. Numerical figures that serve no purpose. Numerical figures that fit into no formula. Plain numerical figures. On a lottery ticket. 

For the first time in my adulthood, I wept. I was not feeling sad. I was not feeling anything in  particular. Warm tears rolled down my cheeks, directly onto the lottery ticket. They spilled out of my eyes in a systematic manner, as if someone was tasked to push a trigger every few seconds to release the next tear. The droplets were neither big nor small, and they fell neither fast nor slow. Everything was happening organically, at a steady pace. It felt natural, it felt right. I felt like a machine. A machine specifically designed for the sole purpose of weeping onto a piece of lottery ticket. The ink on the ticket started to smudge, as the numbers merged to form a clump of unintelligible mess. I did not bother moving the ticket away. In fact, I deliberately let my tears fall onto it. I felt the ticket get heavier and heavier, as more and more droplets of tears struggled to seep into the tiny piece of paper. After a while, it gave up. The lottery ticket tore, and half of it fell to the ground.

I wasted a lottery ticket today. For the sheer feeling of wasting a lottery ticket.