How the cookie crumbles

“You have entered the winter of your life.”

After reading the fortune, I wadded it up inside the cellophane the cookie came wrapped in, tossing it on my abandoned plate. Reaching for another cookie, my dinner companion tried to retrieve the first slip of paper.

“Wait, what did this one say?” He pulled back his empty hand when I rapped his knuckles with my chopstick.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, handing the offending plate to a passing waitress.

I didn’t immediately open the crinkly bag, but instead imagined it was my friend, Cate’s head, squeezing it until it popped open.

It was her idea to list my profile on that horrid website and at her insistence that I went on this single date. She owes me big for my Night of the Moron from Hell, especially since I allowed her to screen my potential match.

She believed she was administering to my depression. A condition, she diagnosed, due to my lack of bedroom action. No matter how I said it, or how often, I couldn’t convince her that despite begin alone, I wasn’t lonely.

The only way to could get her to promise to stop pestering me about my love life, was to go on this date. If she wasn’t a life-long friend, I wouldn’t have even agreed to that.

It was evident during our first five minutes together, that my match’s singular goal for the evening was to get me into bed. His juvenile banter consisted of pathetic sex jokes, and inappropriate questions about my position preferences.

I also had to endure his stream of consciousness diatribe about the deficiencies of his past lovers. Clearly, he insisted, they didn’t know what was good for them.

All I wanted was to get the check so I could leave him at the restaurant.

“Don’t forget to add, ‘in bed,’ to the end of the fortune,” he said, giggling like an adolescent boy.

Cracking apart the cookie, and I pulled the rolled paper from the broken pieces. I could only shake my head at the truth of the fortune.

“The past cannot be cured… in bed.”