I don’t remember when I got the fortune. I don’t remember the meal that precipitated it. I barely remember that moment in time. But I always kept my fortunes, even if they were laughably disenchanting. This one was perfect in its simplicity and its absolution: There is a way to everything you want.

It was sitting loosely on my fridge when you first saw it. It struck you in a more obvious way that it ever struck me. The edges of its words stroking dully at the edge of my consciousness. They were tangible to you. And there was something about it that made me want to hold onto it. Something that compelled me not to let it slip my grasp, lest it be lost to me forever. But I took a picture of it on the top of my mint green microwave and I ordered a special magnet, a little frame for a little fortune.

You wouldn’t accept it, you couldn’t. But when I make up my mind, there’s an absolution to that, too. So you took it with you when you went that morning and for many months it was the only magnet that stood on your fridge. When I’d come over on cool evenings, heart accelerating as we eased down your street, as the warmth of the hallway lights cast everything in such a serious light, I would smile when I saw it. It and I were born of the same thing, and here we both were.

You wouldn’t accept it, you couldn’t, but you didn’t know then that a part of me never really let it go, never really accepted its loss. Because one day, I dreamed we’d share a fridge, and then none of this would matter. It was such a long shot in the early horizons of our days. So many snares were yet to be caught in, so many losses of footing, such white-knuckled hope. I couldn’t know then, I could only dream. And even that was ill-advised.

I hadn’t really thought of it in some time, so accustomed I’d become to seeing my fortune. I gave it to you because you liked it, but also because I wanted you to believe it. I wanted you to never become disheartened at the irritants of boiling down two worlds, I never wanted you to grow tired in the steady slight incline, I never wanted you to question that little space between us that’s always caused by my long-strided pace and your more cautious one. I wanted you to see the end of it. I wanted you to look over the heads of the versions of us that needed to learn all those little lessons and have all those little talks. I wanted you to see this; the home we built and the moment and time we burst through. When all those things had passed and we shared a fridge. I wanted you to know what I knew, what the universe seems to know, what fortune we both now share: There is a way to everything you want.