Luckiest Loser

On a Saturday night I’m spending time with my mom. Just the two of us on our way back to her apartment after a night of bar hopping. Personally, I don’t drink. I leave the partying up to her. Drunkenly she confides in me something she's been feeling for a while. A secret I’m not at liberty to tell, but she slurs a sentence I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear. We come to the last glowing red light before reaching her complex and she says “I’m ready to be a grandma.” I quickly respond with “well good luck with that!” She elaborates that she’d be okay with just being a grandmother to my cousins’ children. I drop her off and go home to my apartment, alone. 

Above my refrigerator there is a box. A gray box with little white flowers. Sometimes I take it down and open it up just to remember her. The items in the box belonged to a girl named Lucy. She had light brown curly hair, big eyes, and a beautiful smile. A beautiful little girl who I never met, because she was never real. Just a dream, a shared dream. She’s the baby I would’ve had if things had 'gone to plan'. Instead I’m alone. From my old life, what I miss the most was the promise of her. How can I miss something I never had? I constantly beat myself up over this thought. I understand that I was unhappy and unwell in my old life. I travel the country and see so much music and make so many memories. I’m living my childhood dream. But when I return home, I just can’t stop thinking of her. 

If you were to ask me now, I would say “I don’t want kids, I'm having too much fun.” What I’m really trying not to say is that I did want a child. I spent many years wanting a family. In another timeline I live in a house with my husband, and down the hall from my bedroom is a guest room. Eventually that room would transform into a nursery. Lucy’s room. The timeline I’m in, there's none of that. Just the box above my refrigerator. 

When I lived in Hawai’i I learned that the North Shore was home to the Triple Crown surf competition due to the fact that a once calm ocean turned into a violent wall. In the winter the waves towered over the shore and crashed into the ground so hard it would eat the sand down to rocks. One day in an attempt to just leave the house we ventured to our favorite beach. I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere near the water, I wasn’t a strong swimmer in the ocean. You’d often see tourists get their asses handed to them thinking they could outsmart the water. The way the ocean moved you would’ve thought it was out to get revenge. A man approached the water with a cocky and nauseating confidence. Like he’s never had anything bad ever happen to him. I watched as he effortlessly was sucked into the motion. The wave brought him up into the sky and before this idiot had realized, he was free falling twenty feet in the air towards the ground. As anticipated, he hit the ground and then immediately was blanketed by foam. He attempted to get up only for another wall to fall down over him. On his hands and knees he tried to crawl out. He couldn’t outrun the break. I watched him get sucked up and spit out. Eventually he mustered up all his stamina and ran for his life, out of the mouth of this vengeful force. Once he cleared the shore break he dropped to his knees, completely exhausted.

I have been thinking a lot about grief in all its forms. I have lived my life knowing that there are two types of people. Those who have experienced grief and those who have not. The people you meet, who have not, tend to be more careless, less sentimental, yet they effortlessly hold onto their youthful charm. Those who have been touched by grief are not sad, but serious. Even if they are the silliest person you know, they still stop every once in a while to ponder. What would life be like if I didn’t lose?

My ex-fiance was one of those who had not been visited by grief until we were about twenty-three years old. His close family friend who he saw as an uncle suddenly passed. Uncle Steve was someone I had met only once. Over Greek food he told us his outlandish stories and memories of my ex’s mother. I was away when he’d gotten the news that he had passed. I always felt terrible that I wasn't there for him. I felt it was my responsibility to walk him through life’s toughest obstacle. My ex had claimed he was “over it” by the time I returned home from my trip. Although as many know, grief is an ocean. Waves come and go, the first one sometimes feeling like a tsunami. Though the waves never stop. When Uncle Steve’s celebration of life came, my ex was asked to prepare a speech. Him being the personable extrovert he was, he spent hours writing it and reading it back to me. Every time with a smile on his face. When the moment came for him to stand in front of a room full of people that watched him grow up to talk about the only person not in the room, he broke down. Seeing him cry was something that rarely happened in our relationship. He was able to get out a short paragraph before stopping. I was recording on my phone and immediately shot out of my seat to stand by his side.

I have experienced grief in many forms. But that is how I know I am rich. You can’t lose something you never had. When my sister’s father got sick when I was eleven, I lost a father figure. When I was fifteen, I lost an uncle, then a great grandma. When David Bowie died, I lost an idol. When my biological father passed away, I lost my bloodline. When my engagement ended, I lost a marriage and a future.

Whilst losing loved ones is a grief that can hurt for a long time, no one prepared me for the loss of a future. When I was little I did not dream of a future where I got married and had children. As a child I just wanted to make it to the next day and nothing more. At twenty I realized I had lived longer than I originally anticipated. In the summer of 2022, I got engaged to my boyfriend of five years. We were young but we got along well and made each other feel safe. We were best friends. Who doesn’t want to spend the rest of their life with their best friend? As the years went by we kept saying we’d get married after I finished college.

In the fall of 2024, I came home from work one late night. I was excited to come home and spend time with my fiance and enjoy the beginning of the holiday season. When I opened the front door, my fiance was sitting at the dinner table with a look on his face I had never seen. He was shaking and looked like he’d been crying. Immediately worried, I asked if his family was okay. I was scared that something had happened to his grandmother that we both loved dearly. With the shakiest voice he asked me to sit. I asked him to tell me what was wrong, I wanted nothing more than to comfort him from what was causing him so much anguish. He proceeded to tell me through tears that he no longer wanted a relationship with me. That he would be leaving on the trip to see his family in Hawai’i that we had been looking forward to for months. I was to be moved out before he returned home. After a few follow up questions, I respected his decision and he left.

I didn’t know at the time that he was cheating on me. He had been having a month-long affair with someone he met at a wedding. During the affair I was in school, working multiple jobs, and traveling for work. Both his uncle and my sister's dad had passed away during this time and I was trying my hardest to be there for his family and mine. I even embroidered a halloween costume for him to wear to a work party. When I look back I see someone who was spread so thin that she ignored all the warning signs. She was exhausted and thought the person she was going to spend her life with was going to be there for her at the end of the day. She was wrong. I was wrong. The betrayal hurt but it doesn’t hurt anymore. What hurts is the future I let myself believe in, then losing it.

It has been over a year since I found out about all of this and six months since I made the decision to leave. After everything had gone down, I wasn’t ready to give up on the future I imagined for myself so I stuck it out and went to marriage therapy, individual therapy, and saw a psychiatrist. I graduated from college and went off to Bonnaroo to work my internship. Upon returning home I realized that I was trying so hard to be there for someone who wasn’t showing up for me. I also found out that he was continuing to talk to other women again. I knew it was over. I didn’t want it to be.

In the weeks after moving out, I would sit on my couch and watch traffic pass as tears streamed down my face for hours. It hurt to lose a future I believed in so much. We would talk about having a baby over brunch. As we got older the more frequent the conversation happened. Her name was Lucy. She felt so real I could see her face and hair so vividly. When I close my eyes now, her smile is engrained in my memory. She was so real to me that I began shopping for clothes, books and toys. When I was alone in my apartment, I wished so badly that she was real. I just wanted a part of him with me forever because I loved him so much it hurt to think that all I have now are memories.

It's January now. If things had gone to plan, we’d be preparing to move into a house. In this house we would be making space for a baby. There would be a backyard for our dog and an extra room that would start out as a guest room, then one day a nursery. I know that there would have been many obstacles between moving into a home and having a baby but I was ready for it. I wasn’t prepared for being alone at twenty-six, trying to provide for myself. Every once in a while I will let myself mourn. The frequency has reduced to once every few weeks instead of hours.

It’s not to say that I will never fall in love again and have children, but I won’t have those with my first love. He and I met while I was still in high school. Transitioning to adulthood with him by my side always felt so special. During covid, I was scared but I was happy that I was locked up with someone who I was never bored with. Living in Hawai’i feels like a dream now. Going to our favorite beach and talking about how amazing it would be to get married there. Family dinners and getting boba with his high school friends. Weekends on the north shore and eating poké in the Tamura's parking lot. Coffee in the morning. Giggling and joking before bed.

I want to be clear that I am not painting a narrative of myself as a victim. Though I did not deserve to be betrayed and hurt that way, I was not perfect. I was often angry and frustrated with my life and all the obstacles I have had to face outside of my marriage. I took out that anger on the person closest to me and have always regretted it. Since beginning therapy and medications, I got better. He did not. I needed to move on. That is why we ended.

As a disclaimer this piece has to do with the passing of my father with some graphic detail. Please read at your discretion.

***

Do you know your father? Like a good amount of people I can say with confidence that I did not. While I hope to not offend any of my paternal family members I simply would like to reflect on my relationship and ultimately my life experience mourning someone I didn’t know. 

My earliest memories of my father feel like dreams I only slightly remember. Maybe they are just dreams but I have held onto them for my whole life that they now are basically my only memories. The first one doesn’t really include him, only his shoes. My mom and I lived in a small one bedroom apartment, just her and I. One day my grandmother came to visit our apartment and I could feel the tension between her and my mother. I had to have been about four or five years old. A conversation was had with my presence in the room and at the end of it my grandmother glanced at something on the floor and seemed defeated. It was my fathers shoes. I believe my mother tried to hide the fact that she and my father were seeing each other again because my grandmother wanted her to do better than a man who left shortly after my birth. Upon reflection from my mother she said she mostly started seeing him again because she wanted me to have a father. I am glad, looking back, that she chose not to stay with him for my sake. 

I have one other memory of my father taking me to a men’s restroom when my mom wasn’t around. Even as a child I felt like he didn’t know what to do in this situation since I was his only girl. This memory I feel is more real because why would I know at that age what a urinal looked like. Other memories I have are from brief encounters in which I was egged on to go say hello to him when I saw him at ceremonies or just out in public. Why was it up to me to approach my own father? Most interactions went like this: I would nervously walk up to him, he would give me a big hug and probably a kiss on the cheek. I could smell cigarettes on his breath. He would ask me how old I was, what grade I was in, what I was up to. All things a father should probably know. I hated interacting with him because these interactions would always end in a tearful goodbye. As a child I knew that I made him feel guilty. Guilty that he had a daughter he didn’t know. He cried every single time.

Years would go by and I wouldn’t see him. My paternal grandmother would always see me and tell me how they were holding onto gifts for me and that I should visit them to pick them up. One year she came and visited me to give me a Christmas gift, far after the holidays. So far that the clothes in the gift no longer fit, I had outgrown the gift I had just received. 

One of the most painful interactions with my father happened when I was about fifteen years old. My mother and I were living on the reservation and were at the grocery store. At this point I hadn’t seen my father in years. My mother and I were walking through the store and she stopped me to say that my father was also in the store. Now aware that he was around, I was looking down every aisle we entered. I turned the corner of an aisle and saw him. He saw me. Then he turned around and walked off into another aisle. Now that I was old enough to understand social interactions I was fully taken off guard by this. Did my father just run away from me? In the grocery store? Granted I was with my mother so he might have been avoiding her. Regardless, we continued our shopping and left the store. As we were leaving, he was waiting by a car as a woman loaded children and groceries into it. I knew I had to perform my daughterly duties and say hello. The interaction went exactly as it always did. He introduced me to his girlfriend and briefly her kids. I didn’t bother retaining any of that information knowing I’d probably never see them again. I never did. 

I have two brothers from my father, they have the same mom. One is older than me and one is younger than me. My oldest brother was around when I was a baby so my family recalled many memories of him while I was growing up. My younger brother I didn’t know existed until he was old enough to walk and talk. A faint memory I have is being faced by a little boy I had never met before, being told that he was my brother. When he’d graduated from middle school my family had reached out and wanted me to join them in celebrating. Seeing this as an opportunity to see my brothers that I love, I decided to go. Very rarely did I spend time with my paternal family. On rare occasions my grandma and aunt would take me out shopping and to lunch. I spent a lot more time with my grandma and aunt than I did with my father. Once I was around seventeen years old, outings with my paternal family, including my father, were more common. They would come down and visit from the reservation and bring me along on shopping trips and out to lunch or dinner. I loved spending time with my brothers which is why I always jumped at the chance to join them. My father was there but our interactions were short and consisted of him trying to poke fun at me and banter but he felt like a stranger. 

On one of our last outings as a family, my father wasn’t joining us at every stop, he opted for sleeping in the car. I didn’t find this very alarming, I just assumed he was being lazy. Not long after, I received a call from my grandmother telling me that my father was in the hospital and that I should come as soon as possible. Not very sure of the severity of this situation I agreed and my brother’s mother came and picked me up. This was the first time I ever remember meeting her. She wasn’t as scary as my mother painted her to be. She was kind and we chatted about my brothers on the way to the hospital. We arrived and I immediately realized the situation was a lot worse than I realized. I wasn’t there for moral support as a family member, I was there to say goodbye. In September of 2017, there was a day in which my father went to bed and never woke up again.

Standing in his hospital room I watched as a tube manually pumped his lungs, blood trickling out of his mouth with every pulse. He laid there completely unconscious. I would never see him open his eyes again. Many people showed up, including a woman I had never seen before who was screaming to the heavens “No! No!”. During a surreal moment I was very confused as to why I wasn’t torn apart like this stranger. My father was dying before my eyes. We each took turns saying our goodbyes. I watched through a glass window as they removed the tube that was breathing for him. I didn’t wait for his heart to stop beating before I walked away. 

His passing confused me. My father just passed away but I felt nothing. I didn’t have many memories to reminisce on. I didn’t attend his funeral. I was back to my normal routine the day after. It wasn’t until I moved in with my ex-fiance (boyfriend at the time). Him and his father had a pretty close relationship. His father routinely called him on the phone to ask how college was going. Seeing him interact with his father opened up the door to my own grief. 

For many years following his death and even now, I grieve for a father I never had. This complicated version of grief is something I had never heard anyone else encounter before. How could I be grieving someone I had to gather memories of like bread crumbs? It wasn’t until about three years after his death that I would fully understand why grieving him perplexed me so much. 

It was 2020 and my grandmother had just lost her own father to Covid. She opened up to me over coffee that grieving him was a lot harder than grieving her own mother who had passed right before my father. “When he passed, I just cried and cried, but I never cried like that for my mother,” she would confess. Without divulging much about my grandmother's trauma, she had a similar relationship to her father as me. It was in this conversation that I spoke some part of my truth to her, coming to a realization I hadn’t had yet come to on my own. I told her about how I often grieved my father more than anyone who’d passed. But this kind of grief didn’t come from missing him. It came from the feeling of missing out. I would never have the experience of a father that called me regularly to check on me. I would never have a father who I would introduce my romantic partners to. I would never have a father to walk me down the aisle. I would never have a father to be the grandfather to my children. It pained me so much that not only did I not have that relationship with him, I never could. He passed a month before my eighteenth birthday. While I didn’t assume he would throw me a party I was anticipating the first time he would call or text me to wish me a happy birthday on my birthday. I never got that happy birthday. He missed my graduation following that summer. We grew close and started seeing each other more often. I had assumed he’d be there for more of my life milestones, only to lose him forever. My grandmother also came to the realization that she would never receive an apology or the love she so desperately wished she got from her father, just like me. 

When my sister was born I was two weeks from 7 years old. I was sat in my carseat as we pulled up to Phoenix Indian Medical Center. It was dark out and the only thing I remember taking note of was that mom was sitting on my favorite pool towel. The hospital staff whisked her away in a wheelchair and I was driven to my sister’s grandma's house. Not my grandma, my sister’s, we have different fathers. The next morning I woke up and was told I had a baby sister and we’d be seeing her later that day. While I don’t remember anything about meeting my sister for the first time (sorry Sam) I remember eating my breakfast knowing things would be different. Looking at the photos of mine and my sister's first meeting, I see my mother in the back. She’s twenty six years old and just gave birth to her second child. 

***

As of writing this, I am twenty six years old. I don’t have any children (unless you count cats) and already have one failed marriage. I got engaged to my “high school sweetheart” (we met on tinder when I was eighteen while I was homeschooled) at twenty two and broke our engagement at twenty five after copious amounts of couples therapy (a story for another time). I moved out of our shared apartment and into my own, scared, but I still did it. Up until now I thought the hard part was getting over the grief of our future together and my old life. Unfortunately, I’m faced with a new challenge. One that I don’t think any other woman in my entire lineage has ever faced. 

What the fuck am I supposed to do now?

Depending on how you frame this situation, this is both a good and bad. How I saw it at first was that my life was drastically changed due to my partner's unfaithfulness. I blamed him for ultimately ruining our marriage but in reality it was bound to end in divorce for one reason or another (kind of wish it was another). Or, you could frame it in the way my therapist and I do. I have closed a chapter of my life where I didn’t feel whole and now have the ability to choose where I go next. The only problem with that is, WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? I sit in my apartment and look at job postings and try to imagine my life in that role just to attempt to get any idea of what I am supposed to be doing with my life. All of my aunts and even grandma’s have had kids before they turned my age. The only women in my life who never had kids was my great great aunt, who was ninety when I knew her, and my great aunt who passed due to a long battle with alcoholism. Other than that, all I know is my ex-fiance’s mother who I would rather not contact because his current girlfriend wants him to cut me out of his life. 

I watch a lot of Sex and the City to try and cope. I could move to another state. I could get my bachelors. I could start writing a memoir. As young girls we are equipped with skills to become a wife and in my culture, a matriarch. We aren't trained on how to be single twenty year olds in charge of their whole future. I know that not everyone has it figured out, but right now I feel like I’m flying completely blind. I never saw this as my future. As a teenager I never thought I’d make it to twenty one. At twenty one I didn’t think I’d ever be single again. This may not seem so daunting to those who may have always assumed they’d be independent living on their own one day, but where I come from it's actually not common at all.

When I was young the idea of a “dream job” never made sense to me. Maybe because my 29 year old mother had yet to discover what her ideal career was. Maybe because my grandfather was a painter which wasn’t a “real job”, so careers were a blurry understanding. Other children would say “I want to be a doctor when I grow up.”  My class was filled with peers who wanted to be astronauts, policemen, firefighters and veterinarians. We had the occasional Actor/Actress wildcard but then there was me. Completely confused. 

I grew up in a nice neighborhood, a suburb of South Phoenix. Where the only thing you needed to fear were the snakes, scorpions, and coyotes (oh my!). The makeup of my classmates was mostly white but to be fair there was still a good mix of other children of color. Though not many other Native American students, which I was one of. Although I was young I quickly noticed that there were two categories of children. Children who grew up with a big happy family in a large house with a pet and were probably part of a youth sports team. Then there were children, like me, who had single parents and lived in an apartment. You could tell because many of us apartment kids looked to be wearing hand-me-downs or sometimes smelled of cigarettes (I probably smelled like weed). You would have outliers to this categorization. Such as Madison, an apartment kid who had a single mother. A few times I saw her picking up her district provided grocery package. A bag of food such as bread, milk, cereal and other basic foods. That meant she was poor, like me. I never mentioned this to her or anyone. She always had nice clothes, was friends with the kids with big houses, had an iPod, how was she poor? 

My mom worked at a daycare only a few blocks away from my school and most days I would walk to her work instead of going over to my grandparent’s house. They had an afterschool program for school age kids. Although I was older than all of those kids I still participated in arts and crafts and other games and activities. One day we were asked to write down our “dream job” and draw a picture of ourselves as that profession. As mentioned previously, I didn’t know what kind of answer to give. I didn’t want to be a doctor or veterinarian. A first responder seemed like too scary of a job. To be honest I didn’t know of too many professions outside of these. I was an artistic kid. I prided myself on being an amazing artist for my age (based on my own critiques of my elementary art class). I would be sitting at that tiny table contemplating a career that didn’t sound scary or boring. Finally it hit me, my current obsession! Ghost hunting shows. “I want to be a Paranormal Investigator when I grow up”. The lady who was supervising us gave me an apprehensive look. I know now that I was weird, but I loved Ghost Adventures. This was circa 2008 when Ghost Adventures premiered on the Travel Channel. Both comical and suspenseful, I would get so excited to go home and watch it. 

* * *

It’s 2025 and I am now 26 years old. The same age as my mother when she had her second child, and a few years younger than when she had me come home telling her I was going to hunt ghosts when I grew up. In the years between then and now, I have had a failed career as an artist after years of being a sales associate. For the last year I have had a good go at working in the music industry but nothing that can keep me afloat. I didn’t go to college right out of high school due to lack of interest and obvious financial obstacles. Although I did recently graduate with an associates in music business. Jobs that peak my interest often require a bachelor's degree which I have yet to obtain. Before I get to the interview process my application gets thrown out or I get an email telling me I don't meet the minimum requirements.

Letters to J*rk Off To by Aly Adrinne (2025)