Superstitious

I consider myself a skeptic. I don’t believe in things that I can’t verify through either my own experience or through the scientific research of people who get paid for that kind of thing. If I can’t touch it, taste it, smell it or see it, or if it hasn’t been verified in a lab somewhere, then it doesn’t exist.

That being said, I’m still bound up in superstition. I believe it’s possible to jinx an event. I believe certain numbers are just, inherently, better than others (three, six and nine are a good combination). I believe silver is a “good” metal. And places where bad things have happened feel…haunted to me.

Rationally, that whole preceding paragraph feels incredibly silly. I know absolutely none of that is true. There’s nothing about a number that makes it quantifiably better or worse than another number. However, that doesn’t change the fact that I put in nine packets of sugar into my coffee, in three groups of three, specifically because three is a good number. I feel slightly better knowing that my coffee has been sweetened three by three.

The whole thing reeks of a touch of the obsessive compulsive or the remnants of those things I believed as a kid. As I got older, I stripped away each and every of those beliefs in the metaphysical and the supernatural. The afterlife, psychic ability, ghosts, hauntings; I drove them down to their knees with reason and killed them one by one.

But belief dies hard and in tiny little ways, they still exist. My subconscious is haunted by ghosts and demons, created by my own desire to believe that there is magic in this world, even if I know there isn’t.

So…even though I know it’s silly, I’ll hold onto those fragments, because three is a good number (but not as good as six) and silver can keep the monsters at bay and there are places where the bad things happened that are truly haunted.

Dylan Charles