A Little Bit Like Home

The Burden of the Past

I have a ritual when I get a fortune cookie. First, I break it in two. Then I eat the half that does not contain the fortune. After that, I pull out the little strip of paper, read whatever wisdom has been tucked inside and eat the other half while deciding whether the cookie was fresh, stale or somewhere in the broad middle ground where most fortune cookies seem to live.

There is also a ritual before the cookie is opened. In a group, cookies are passed around at random, as though destiny has been sealed inside a brittle piece of dessert. If it’s just Beth and me, whether at a table or with takeout, I ask her to choose left or right.

Most of the time, the fortunes are harmless. They offer practical advice, cheerful encouragement or vague promises that can be applied to almost anyone: Visualize the win. Great risk brings great reward. Unexpected happiness is on its way.

Others are not really fortunes at all. They are expressions, observations or sentences that sound like they wandered away from a motivational poster.

Still, we read them. That is part of the fun. We pass them around the table. We laugh at the ones that seem especially accurate. We raise an eyebrow at the ones that do not. Sometimes we add the customary ending people have been attaching to fortune-cookie fortunes for generations, though this is a family column, so I will trust you to finish that thought on your own.

A few years ago, I began tucking some of those fortunes into my wallet. My idea was to put them together at the end of the year, take a photo and post a fortune-cookie year in review. It seemed like a different way to summarize a year: a handful of tiny paper predictions — none of which were legally binding.

The other day, I opened one that felt different: “You will be released from the burden of your past.” I read it once, then read it again.

I have a past. Everybody does. There are things I would not choose to relive, things I understand differently now than I did at the time and memories that still need to be handled with some care. But I am not sure I would call them burdens. Not anymore.

That was what gave me pause. For the first time I can remember, I wondered if I had received someone else’s fortune.

Maybe that little slip of paper was not meant for me. Maybe it was meant for someone sitting at another table. Maybe it belonged to someone who smiled when the cookies were passed around, cracked one open, read the words silently and folded the paper back onto the table before anyone asked what it said. That happens, I think.

Some fortunes are easy to share. They are light enough to pass around with the soy sauce and leftover rice. We can laugh about wins, risks, confidence and unexpected happiness. We can joke about whether the cookie was right or wrong.

But some words are heavier. A fortune cookie weighs almost nothing. The little paper inside weighs even less. But the burden it names can be enormous. To some people, the past is not a story they tell around the table. It is a load they keep carrying long after everyone else has moved on to dessert.

Sometimes those burdens are obvious. Often they are not. People carry old hurts in ways that do not always show. They go to work, buy groceries, sit in restaurants and read fortune cookies like everyone else. Only they may be carrying more than anyone at the table realizes.

That is what this fortune has done for me. It has not convinced me that I am trapped under the burden of my past. Instead, it has reminded me that someone else might be. So I put it in my wallet with the others.

It is still there, tucked among the promises of wins, rewards, confidence and unexpected happiness. I do not know whether it arrived at the wrong table, in the wrong cookie or on the wrong day. But I am keeping it for now.

Not because it explains me perfectly, but because someday I may be sitting across from someone who needs to know release is possible.

Tom Brand is a St. Joseph, Missouri, writer whose latest book, “You Have To Leave If You Want To Come Back,” is available at RichardsonPress.com. He keeps fortune-cookie fortunes in his wallet, but his financial adviser has not endorsed this strategy.