When you live with your maniac mom in a trailer park you resign yourself to certain realities.

For one thing you’re never getting out. Like ever.

You can forget about a life too. You’re too poor to be anything but a ‘team’. Your paycheck goes into the communal bank account to pay the utilities and the credit cards. In society’s eyes you’re less than zero, because you’re thousands in debt already.

God bless Capital One, Merrick and Chase, and more than a few Hail Marys for Walmart’s quick cash feature. You can say your prayers in front of the cheap toilet, in the fumes of your tin can’s off gassing, your knees sticking to the flimsy and fake vinyl tile, the light of the candle you lit flickering and giving life to hungry shadows because you’re afraid of your power bill.

And maybe, when you give in to the stress and go out through your front door, onto the ramshackle deck you built last summer with a cigarette hanging from your cracked lips and a lighter warm and half empty in your paw, you wonder why and how and where. Maybe, as you look at the lights of a distant city that shines like fallen stars, you ask yourself just what it was that put you here and not there.

Something stole your destiny, you convince yourself as you take a deep, rich drag off that Marlboro, the crickets chirping in the trash heap and the rubbery stink of a pile of cracked, old tires mingling with your smoke, the Budweiser and the cheap vodka slow and languid lightning in your veins, the Fantasy 5 ticket in your pocket a beacon of black hope in the back of your mind.

No, life isn’t easy, but then and there you forget the nasty fat man that clogged the toilet at the Chevron you work at, the neighbor who talks too much and blows twenty bucks at the scratcher machine every other day, the alcoholic who reminds you of you as he comes in around 5 like clockwork and buys a big bottle of cheap liquor. Then and there you’re *you*, and *you* will come out on top because you’re *you*. There’s an ace up the sleeve of your destiny. You just have to survive until it hits the rotten, slimy felt of your life’s table and the winning paw changes everything.

It’s then that you notice the stars. This far from the city they’re bright and many, sparkling sharp and white and clean like new knives through the wild, mangy bows of the trailer park trees. You smile.

“Could be worse,” you say softly to no one as the wind picks up and you crush the butt of the cigarette beneath a worn boot and turn to go inside.

Yes, it could always be worse. There aren’t many generalizations on the face of the earth that are generally true, yet that one will always be one.

Yes, I know, wtf.

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