SENIOR ISSUE: The Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune

by fourth-year Meghan Hawley

I watch the ladybug crawl across the faded white paint of my small apartment bedroom. As a little girl I believed that if one of the little red beetles landed on me, they would bring good luck—but as a young woman I’m not so sure. She reaches her destination and settles on the crinkled corner of the tarot card I pinned to my wall. 

How much has changed between then and now? The girl I used to be would not know what a tarot card is—past a rhyme for “carrot” if she read it in a book. She wouldn’t recognize the people hanging in frames across my room, photos glossy and rife with strange sets of dimples and freckles and curls. The postcards by my desk would all be of places completely foreign to her, and she would turn her tom-boy nose up at dresses on hangers and skirts folded haphazardly in my closet.

And yet, she’d recognize some of the books on my shelf. She’d remember the smell of the beat-up paperbacks that were added to my shelf four bedrooms ago. She’d trace their cracked spines and ask me how the series finally ended. And while she would look for the paints and markers I no longer own, she’d understand that I filled the same niche in my life with yarn and hooks, satisfying the shared desire to create with a different vice.

She isn’t really here of course, between the eggshell walls of my small apartment bedroom, but I know she’s still inside of me. I’m on the cusp of adulthood, but I’m also 19 and 16 and 12 and 8 and 5. I’ve celebrated twenty-two birthdays—blown out twenty-two sets of candles—each time throwing a party for the person I once was, the girl inside of me, and the woman I will become.

And yet the Wheel of Fortune still hangs on my wall. It spins and spins, forever creating the new woman I’ll wrap myself in. I open my window and slip the ladybug into my palm. She flies away in the breeze, a bright flash of red against a clear blue sky.