"Your secret desire to completely change your life will manifest."

"Your secret desire to completely change your life will manifest."

It was a year ago last Friday I read those words off a slip of paper wedged by machine into a Chinese fortune cookie I ate at dinner. In a turn of events best-suited for a W. W. Jacobs story, that desire came true in the most unwelcome of ways.

Nowadays I don't eat Chinese food much. On the rare occasion when I do, it's a light dim sum brunch and always with a group of people. This maximizes the number of cookies brought to the table and thus in my mind increases the randomness of my receiving any one particular fortune.

I don't exactly believe in fate, or prophecy, or fortune for that matter. But I know what I read, and I know what has happened since, and I am in no hurry to do something similar anytime soon.

It has been an amazing, wonderful, horrific, sleep-depriving journey. And the truly astonishing part of it all is that this year has been but the first step along a journey of a thousand proverbial miles. I say "proverbial miles", because in reality it was over 2,000 literal miles and that doesn't include the vacation to Connecticut.

Somewhere early on in this last year I lost that slip of paper. Between tucking it reverently back into my wallet and moving to the other side of the continent to leave everything behind and reboot my life anew, it flitted away from me. Maybe it's gone forever, maybe it's tucked inside a book that's lodged in one of the boxes I still haven't unpacked. I don't really regret this for the same reason that nobody knows or cares what happened to the envelope that the Declaration of Independence was placed inside when it was sealed, stamped, and delivered to England.

It did its job. Message received. Let's move on.