You Shouldn't Gamble With the Universe
Excerpt From a Novel I'll Never Write
“I didn’t come here to tell you I can’t live without you—I can live without you… I just don’t want to.”
- Rumor Has It (2005)
They say a cheater is always a cheater, and I’ve always assumed that it started young—perhaps a quality you’re born with. A cheater is always a cheater, or perhaps some are just more likely to cheat, like how kids who stalk their backyards for little animals to kill are more likely to turn out serial killers. Like my little cousin, who used to chase us around with a knife, and mom had to sit my aunt down and tell her the repercussions: what this could mean for a future version of the screaming four year old boy.
But I was never a cheater. I was a good girl, a sweet thing. In high school, during our SAT, they gave us a bathroom break. My friend’s boyfriend had sent her the answers to it all on WhatsApp, and we huddled together in the stall; she was giggling, her eyes already wide with ivy dreams, but I couldn’t go through with it. She passed with flying colors. I failed, much to my mothers’ dismay.
My dad told me it would pay off, though—he had this belief that karma followed you wherever you went. Like if you steal something, maybe you’ll have a car accident on your way home. Or maybe your favorite vase will break. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Small or big. You can’t gamble with the universe, he’d tell me.
I’ve never been a fan of adrenaline—the fast-beats always felt like panic attacks, so I was quite timid growing up, always walking away from the weed they did in the backrooms, always telling mom where I was going instead of sneaking out the window, always letting dad drop me off at dates or functions. Lying was something that could follow me: the karma, you know. So I never lied. I didn’t think I was good at it.
When I met him, he made my heart beat at a steady pace. It was then I knew I loved him—when I was around him it felt the same as when I’d swim in the pool and duck under the water and everything would go quiet, like I was the only one in the world. I didn’t think I’d ever enjoy sharing that feeling—that nirvana-like aloneness—with anyone, until we fell asleep on the couch, halfway through a movie. I woke late at night to look at him, his breath slowly releasing from his nose, his cheeks pink because he didn’t take off his hoodie and it was the middle of the summer heat, and I knew. I knew that this was a version of the bottom of the pool, a meditative state, a holy and rare find, and I took him between my hands and swore I’d never, ever let him go.
But I suppose there was something tantalizing about having been good so long. My friends around me always wreaking havoc, dancing at the clubs, shot after shot, man after man. Driving crazy, ignoring the stop signs, crossing even when the light was red. I was always the designated driver, then, as well as the one offering the water, and, of course, the one holding up the hair, as she emptied into the toilet. I was always the one: solid. Steady. So, painfully careful. He didn’t like this much about me—my painful punctuality and my ever-annoying anxiety over things; the fact that I was the mother of the group, and our dances were always stopped with emergency signals to help. To produce the Advil from my purse. To bandage the cut. To hold the goddamn hair up as my own drunkeness faded, as the good songs ended, as he waited at the bar.
But it was me, and he loved me, as he said, whatever way I came. We fit together well, see; he’d see my leg shaking and take my hand. I’d see him get carried away with his words, and change the subject. We kissed clean, fucked routinely. Met each others’ parents. Wanted two kids. Girls, because he preferred them. A third-floor apartment, overlooking the city. Close enough to my mom, far enough from his dad. He ran baths for me, I put away the dishes. He did the laundry, I folded it.
It was comfortable. Who doesn’t like comfortable?
Maybe I was pent up. Maybe I wasn’t lucid. Maybe it was just stupidity, a manifestation of my clumsiness—I never considered cheaters fell into it, but I did. I was alone—not mentally, just physically, and my joints were tired of being glued to my sides. It was supposed to be one drink, a few chapters of a book, a seat by the window. I didn’t know how drunk I was until much later, until it felt like the lights of the bar blended together, until I began to wonder if I was due for an eye exam, until I was smoking cigarettes a handsome mustache lit for me. And this one—this strange boy in front of me—had a laugh that made my heart do a little jump, which was interesting that I enjoyed, and with his hands at my waist, pulling me into his sweat, it was all my lips could do but meet his.
Perhaps those two hours were the only ones I didn’t think about anything but what was in front of me—not of my future, or my past. I wasn’t counting the number of shots Sarah took, because I knew at six she’d be puking and at eight she’d be crying about whatever ex was due at the time. I wasn’t eyeing my friend’s drinks because I didn’t want anyone strange to touch them. I wasn’t thinking of him and if I’d left him too long alone. I could only think of my pleasure, of the way his hands held my hips, the way this strangers’ kiss was sloppy and wet, the way he smelled of expensive bourbon and cheap perfume, the music around us deafening, the stall just big enough to fit our insanity. The way his hands smelt of Marlboro reds, when they reached my mouth.
Once a cheater, always a cheater, is what I thought once the haze lifted. It was my dad’s voice, followed by his speeches about karma, and I wondered when mine would reach me, and how I could possibly outrun it. It was only then I remembered my iPhone, the shared location, and the fact that there was a boy who loved me. He was on the other side of the crosswalk, watching with furrowed brows as the strange man’s hand pinched the other side of my waist. I’ll walk you, he had said, and I’d agreed in my rare moment of selfishness. I saw the boy, my boy, do the math in his head, and take a few steps back, run his hand through his hair, and leave the bottom of the pool we shared, finally going back up for air. And I doubted he would ever come back down.
I sobered up quickly after that.
Shame is a feeling I am familiar with, though only presently does it feel like it should exist between my bones. Like it truly belongs. The shame I felt before was a hostile, empty thing—no reason for it to be. I spend weeks in bed, and the friends’ I’d helped don’t spend longer than a few minutes trying to sooth me before returning to their lives. My boy doesn’t answer his phone, and eventually I stop calling—I try to waddle my way through the nights. I try to think of excuses I’d say if he gave me the time of day: I wasn’t in my right mind, felt too cliche, and so did It meant nothing. The fact was it meant something: something too instinctual and animal and I couldn’t deny it. I needed to break to understand why I am the way I am, perhaps. But there is no excuse for one that’s been cheated. Trust is like paper, they say on the internet. You can’t un-wrinkle wrinkled paper. Or whatever.
And so I allowed myself to become a stranger. I kissed other strangers, taking note of their different scents, understanding just from touch what was more important to them. Some spent their money on the best alcohol, others’ pretty suits, many special watches. But never did they kiss like my boy, and I found amidst my drunken, alone nights that I was only swallowing what almost-could-be. I still hated the adrenaline, but with enough alcohol, that subsides, and there’s a dangerous place you reach where you do not think. Even there, perhaps not the bottom of a pool but rather in the middle of some black hole, I would think of him, even in the nights where I was so far gone I couldn’t see my feet in front of me. I’d think of his calloused hands, his musk, the way his lips moved faster than his thoughts—his left side more animated than the right. Little, small details. It’s always the little, small details.
One hangover, three months later or so, I found myself at his door, no words just instinct. His eyes weren’t angry when the door shuddered open, but almost confused. Word spread fast around here, in our little town, and perhaps he knew of my month-long sabbatical of gross unbecoming. Some would say it was heartbreak. I wouldn’t say so, but maybe.
“I have no grand gesture,” I said, “no great string of words. I can go on without you, but I’d just… I’d just rather not.” And then came a throw-up of words, about pools and the bottoms of them, about my cousin who is destined to be a serial killer, and about my friend, who has cheated on every boyfriend she’d ever had, and how maybe cheaters have a strand of DNA that dictates them—”But I didn’t cheat on my SAT even when everyone else did, do you remember, our junior year?” and some more strings of broken sentences about how it wasn’t a mistake, per se, but a moment I had to live in, perhaps. Not that I had to taste another pair lips, not that I had looked for something better, not that there were comparisons to be made, but just that I had wound up in a moment I could not escape from. “You’ll probably ask if he—they—were any good, and I will probably say it all meant nothing—you know, like in the movies—but everything means something; sometimes we don’t know what they should mean, but they do, and—” I took a sharp breath. “—I guess that was the lesson. That sometimes things mean things, but we can’t put our fingers on them. You know?” And you shouldn’t have gotten caught up in it, I continue, but I’ve finally become a woman with dirt on her hands—and maybe that’s all I wanted to be. To be a broken girl rather than a good one, the water around me no longer blue and clean but green and ugly, no longer over-giving, no longer watchful, and will you take me, my beautiful boy, and we’ll sink to the bottom of the pool where we once were, and just see—just check—if our edges match up like they had before?
Authors note: I watched Rumor Has It, a weird, broken movie, with a weird, distasteful plot-line. And this came to me. If it was up to me I’d rewrite the whole movie, but I don’t have the time. The bones, maybe, are good. Generational trauma? Is that what they were going for?
I suppose With Love, Amal was collection of letters to the ether, tastefully placed between acceptable time-frames—but it is now Poetic License, a dump for all my writing, which I enjoy writing and sharing, despite the little voice that reminds me I suck. I’m unemployed, reading, thinking. A lot comes out of me in phases like this. I don’t want to deny myself the pleasure of posting a piece I am done with. If I don’t post when my heart says so, there’s a good chance I’ll never let it out of my grip.
Should I make a separate newsletter for my different work? I’d rather have everything in one place, and I have separated things with tags: Poems, Letters, Excerpts, but maybe we should get more focused, and I have some anxiety about spamming you. Any ideas for a solution?
Thank you for reading, if you do.
Xoxo.
And it’s still, always, with love.
Poetic License © 2025. Some stories are borrowed from life. Some, from dreams. The author, however, always pulls from moments she has truly touched.
Why isn't this a novel? It's so beautiful.
amal, you did it again