After the worst happened, however, my attitude changed. I became nihilistic and full of rage. There was no point to anything. And that supreme desolation—that realization that I had been abandoned by my own certainty of how the world worked—gave me the reckless freedom to do something truly wild. I started believing in myself. I believed everything I thought. I couldn’t fail. My newfound narcissism felt like revenge. I figured that if the world was going to wreak its random cruelty on me, I might as well aspire to greatness in the meantime. Once I discovered Three’s Company, I understood I could take the chaos of the universe and put a recognizable, finite face on it, the ultimate pareidolia.

I’m just glad I had the money to do it. Such a discovery would have been endlessly painful had I not been able to afford to make it happen. Big dreams are shameful when survival is on the line. Had I remained in my trailer, broke but dreaming, I might have eventually anesthetized myself with booze or drugs. There were a lot of good role models in the town I lived in, that’s for sure, so many people who’d become accidentally-on-purpose dead. But the lottery money had bought me another life. Another nine lives, counting all the main Three’s Company cast throughout the years. I would dedicate a year or more to living as each character as the spirit moved me. I was happy to shuffle off the coil that had trapped me for so long, my identity, and try a few new ones. So many people wanted to solve their problem of self; I wanted to trash it entirely. The world was so haphazard and frightening, why not arrange it the way I wanted it? Why not?

Krystal would have laughed at all this. Or sneered. During that final visit she had accused me of being in denial—she probably wanted me to confront my trauma, to wallow in misery with her, just like those reporters had wanted me to put money back into my trailer park forever, pumping blood into a dead corpse. But look where wallowing got her. Confronting trauma indeed. In my mind those kinds of phrases belonged to weaker specimens, a lower order of person who believed in living the worst day of their life over and over again, in perpetuity, an eternal pity party disguised as healing.

Sometimes, in the quiet of the off days, in between restocking the shelves, I pretended Krystal was there with me, if only to verbally lambaste her into oblivion. I wanted to tell her: You’re the one in the wrong. You’re the one making excuses, using your life’s events as a reason to quit, to fall into grief, to fail. Not me, though. Maybe that works for you, but it won’t work for me.

I said a lot of things to invisible Krystal. I made my case. I never failed to be eloquent, persuasive, maybe a little verbose. And in my imagination she never failed to be impressed. Completely awed by my wit and correctness. She was silent, craving my words, on the verge of tears. Sometimes I envisioned slapping her in the face.