It was New Year’s Eve, and something about being on the cusp of a new beginning gave Nuhu a fresh dose of confidence.
He loved new things, whether a new shirt from his favourite vendor, new shoes from his best friend’s store, a new restaurant that just opened down the street, and now…a new girlfriend on the horizon.
Nuhu believed in fate, even though he knew how childish that sounded – a thirty-year-old man who read horoscopes and based his life on what his star said about him. His favourite restaurant was his favourite because they gave out fortune cookies with each order. He looked forward to unwrapping those little origami-shaped cookies just to see the rectangular slip of paper that accompanied it.
Any day he woke up feeling out of sorts, he made sure to stop by the restaurant on his way to work and pick up something, and then while in his car before driving out of the parking lot, he would greedily unwrap the fortune cookie to see what the day held for him.
Sometimes the messages were quirky like if you eat something and nobody sees you eat it, then it has no calories. He had found that one particularly hilarious and had taken a photo of it and sent it to his friend who was on a weight loss journey.
Another time, he had gotten one that said Perhaps you’ve been focusing too much on spending. That week, he had made sure to save more than he spent and he had felt accomplished, patting himself on the back.
The most recent one he’d gotten was quite hilarious: I see money in your future…it’s not yours though.
That one had hurt a teeny bit. What did it mean? He wasn’t a thief neither was he a scammer.
Why couldn’t the money be his? Or was he going to marry a rich heiress?
He had pondered on that one perhaps a little too much, but then he had added it to his stash in his drawer at home.
There weren’t that many people who understood him or his weird obsession with fortune cookies. For him, it was more than just fortune cookies, for him it gave him something to believe in, something to anchor his life on. Life was too uncertain to live without a guiding light of some sort. Before he had started keeping fortune cookies and reading horoscopes, he found that he went about life with a perpetual anxiety. He was anxious about what could happen, and then when nothing happened, he became anxious about that too.
He had spoken to his mother (yes, he had that kind of relationship with his mother) about it and she had looked at him solemnly and given him one recommendation:
“You need to find Jesus,” she said.
“What?”
“Yes. I know your father and I didn’t bring you up in the church or anything like that but I think we were wrong about that.”
“And you just tell me that now? Now, Mummy?”
“Well, we make mistakes and we learn from them.”
“So what changed your mind?”
“My sister.”
“Your sister?”
“Yes. Whenever I see her, she never has a care in the world. She never worries or complains about anything. She is always at peace, and it bothered me so much until I asked her about it.”
“And she told you it’s Jesus?”
“Yes.”
“Ha,” he had laughed. It sounded too simple, too easy to be true. How did it work?
He had gone to church the next Sunday after having the conversation with his mother, but he had found that it took too much energy to get the peace he wanted. At church, they wanted you to pray, and read the Bible, things that took time and energy he wasn’t sure he had. He needed an easy fix for his anxiety, not more work.
One morning, he had been flipping through the newspaper and stumbled on the horoscope and zodiac signs section and all he needed was to read what they said about him and he was hooked.
He found that even though he didn’t have a complete handle on the anxiety, he approached life with a sense of control. He knew what to expect and even when it didn’t happen the way his fortune cookies or horoscopes said it would, he tried to see good in the things that had gone differently.
Today, the day before New Year was critical. He loved new things, yes, but he didn’t particularly appreciate a new year. It was like a wide-open road without markings or signs, rather you had to chart your course, and what if you did the wrong thing? Went the wrong way? How did you resolve it?
He found that his anxiety often came back around the end of the year, and he read the horoscopes with more diligence than he had the entire year, he visited the restaurant more often during the same period, like an addict who needed their fix to function.
It was 4:30 pm when he left the office. The office closed earlier on New Year’s Eve because everybody was in a hurry to arrive home and prepare for the New Year. He was spending New Year at his parents’ house. His mother was making coconut rice and goat meat and he was looking forward to a well-cooked homemade meal. But before then, he needed to get his fix.
The restaurant was on his way home so he didn’t need to make a detour to pick up a meal and…a fortune.
The new year was upon him, among other things, he needed love. Would he by chance find it in 2025? He wasn’t getting any younger and it would be nice to spend the next New Year’s Eve with his wife rather than his mother. If only he could get a fortune that spoke of his future in romance.
Stepping out of his car and into the restaurant, he smiled at the waiter and headed straight for the counter to place his usual order – spicy Singaporean noodles.
He had stopped caring about the quality of the noodles by the fifth time he ordered them because whether or not it was delicious, didn’t affect his fortune.
He watched with round anticipatory eyes as the server scooped the noodles into a plastic takeaway and then packed a pair of chopsticks and a fortune cookie alongside, in the branded plastic bag.
His eyes widened as he grabbed it from her, after slotting his card into the pin pad for payment.
In the car, he tore the cookie wrap open and unfolded the strip of paper ready to know his 2025 romantic future.
Love is on the horizon.
Yes! Finally, he thought.
The stars predict she will be a tall, fair unicorn.
And for the first time, he doubted his fortunes.
