Karma

Do you believe in karma? I sort of do. I want to believe in karma because I like to believe that if I try to be a good person and do good things for others, then good things will happen to me. And I like to believe that when people are horrible, that they will get their comeuppance eventually, even if I'm not around to see it happen.
But sometimes I find it impossible to believe in karma. I'm not convinced, for example, that people dying of cancer somehow did something at some point in their life (lives?) that is now causing them to suffer. I'm not convinced that some people deserve to have fantastic luck while others are fated to have one misfortune after another because somewhere along the line they screwed up and now they're suffering an entire lifetime of bad karma. I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes really bad things happen to really good people, and I don't understand how karma can possibly explain that. But in general I believe in karma.
Which is why I'm a little worried about the fact that I, um, kind of damaged a parked car the other day and didn't leave one of those "Sorry I hit your car, here is my info" notes. I was leaving work in kind of a rush because I wanted to get home in time to meet my family for dinner, and I was on my phone with my dad at the time, and as I backed out of my parking space I heard a little crunch. I saw the truck behind me, I just misjudged the distance between my car and the truck. So of course I started cursing and my dad said, "What, what is it?" and I said, "I just hit this truck that was parked behind me," and he said, "Is there any damage?" and I said, "I don't know" and then I got out to look and my car was fine except for a little crack in the fender that I don't think you'd even notice if I didn't point it out. The truck on the other hand, had a dent in its fender. To be honest, I don't know how bad the dent was because I didn't look that hard at it, I just briefly noticed that it was in fact damaged, said "Damn it!" and Dad said, "Did anyone see you hit it?" and I said, "No, I don't think so," and he said, "Well, just leave, then." And so I did. I don't really know why I listened to him, because then I spent the rest of the night panicking that maybe somebody DID see me hit the truck and had taken down my license plate number and put it on the truck for the truck's owner and that the cops were in the process of trying to track me down. Oh, and I spent the evening feeling terrible. I felt absolutely terrible for doing that. In fact, I felt so bad about it that I kind of couldn't stop talking about it all night long, until finally my mom was like, "*A*, really, I'm glad you have such a conscience, but you really need to stop talking about it. It's fine."
Since then I've been able to rationalize the incident in a bunch of ways. I logically know that the cops aren't actually spending any time looking for my car. And if anyone actually was, I think they would have tracked me down by now, I think. The truck in question was pretty beat up even without my dent--and actually, the more I think about it, the more I don't really understand how my little car could have dented the taller truck's fender, so maybe I didn't even actually cause the dent I noticed (I probably did, but maybe I didn't)--and I am trying to rationalize that maybe it was good that I left without admitting that I did damage, just in case the owner would have tried to fix a whole bunch of things on his truck, pretending all of its problems were my fault. And then there's the biggest thing working in my favor, the fact that the truck was parked up against the back of a building directly under a big orange and black sign that says NO PARKING. Clearly there's not enough room to get out of the proper parking spots if anyone is parked there, so the dumbass kind of deserves the damage for parking illegally in the first place and trapping the properly parked cars, right? I'm also trying to convince myself that this is just karmic payback for the two times my car has been minorly damaged in parking lots, but I'm pretty sure karma doesn't work retroactively like that.
So yeah, okay, I still feel bad, and I'm still waiting for a lightning bolt to strike me at any minute. I'm even afraid to write about it here, but maybe if I admit to everyone that I'm one of those assholes that damages people's property and doesn't admit it, the universe won't hate me so much.