A childhood belief about special powers

When I was about 8 I thought that you could make a wish and it would come true. But only occasionally. If you did it too much or asked for something outlandish then it wouldn't work.

Everyone could do this by spending their "luck". Everybody had so much luck, and they could spend it as they wanted to, but if they ever ran out they wouldn't have any luck left if an emergency happened. Your luck is used in life (consciously or not) when something really good happens to you without your direct intervention. Naturally I correlated this personal luck to any particularly beneficial or serendipitous event, and felt cautious afterwards since that meant my current luck supply had now reduced by some amount.

To save "luck" I always waited a long time between wishes and only wished for small things, like winning at a video game or something. Spending more luck meant you could accomplish more with that wish. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, it all depended on how effectively my luck was working that day. I never thought about where these wishes or the luck came from, that's just how it was.

Oh yeah, and there was my biggest "big" wish: for a beautiful girl to materialize out of a magazine picture and kiss me. Wow, I had saved up a year's worth of luck for that one. Needless to say, I was disappointed, and went to bed completely frustrated at all that wasted luck. Then years later in high school, some girl asked me out who looked eerily like the one in the picture. The recollection hit me after our first kiss.

Ep: We were blissfully in love until the inevitably tearful college separation, but I'd say it was worth all that luck in the end.