My mother plays the lottery. If ever there was a sentence that summed up the beautiful and damning things about my upbringing, there it is.

I want to understand her. I want to know what is behind her religion and her blind optimism, how it came that one is so much a part of me and one is not.

I can see decades frittered away, a couple dollars at a time, without anything to show but a hope that maybe it'll work out better next time. I wonder how many times those thoughts have applied to me.

I guess as it stands right now, my mother plays the lottery and  I pay for the tickets and I wonder if it's rent I feel I have to pay because I'm nothing like her. Our noses and our thumbs and our smiles, a likeness of bone and muscle, our voices sound so much alike on the phone. But my mother plays the lottery and I can't imagine betting and gambling hopes like that.

I guess, tho, people are my lottery. Right now, I'm planning to get a tattoo with a girl with whom I am developing a list of topics we can't discuss. The closest thing I have to a sister loaned me money that I dread her asking me to pay back. My best friend and closest partner is a man who has a decade of saying I love you to a woman who isn't me. And I'm worried I made a suit of pretty clothes for someone I barely know and I'll expect them to wear them to finally live out my little Gone with the Wind fantasy.

So my mother plays the lottery. I bet my heart and soul on people who could leave or not love me back or could tear me apart. We all do things that seem insane from the outside.