The afternoon sun shot through the blinds of our inner-city office, bouncing off the various adornments my office desk played host to. The day wasn’t a milestone of any sort, but it felt a tiny bit special; it didn’t feel like any other day, and were you to give me the time, I probably couldn’t have told you why. My mum was in hospital, job propositions lingered over my head, and I’d burned through far too much of my financials to be sporting a grin, but in that tiny little reflective part of my computer monitor, I was staring back at a smile. Something was good – not great, but good.
I guess that’s how most of my life has been lived. If there’s a single dash of promise, a day will pass twice as fast. No one want’s to feel like there’s nothing new around the corner, so when something catches your eye and draws you into that world of possibility, it’s hard to pump that anticipatory excitement out of your veins. I love that feeling though; I love the feeling of knowing something special has just knocked on the door. But sometimes you need a little bit of reassurance to really understand how it all works, a second opinion, even if it be by someone you’ve never met. That very day, sitting in the same chair in the same office in the same street, I think I found it.
…
There sat a scrunched up piece of paper with a horoscope scrawled on one side. It meant less to me than most – “superstitious junk” my parents would tell me when I was just a young boy. I was impartial to the blurbs, writing the words off as an emotional lottery that could be as right as it were wrong. At 23 years of age, I had not the faintest idea what my star sign was and absolutely no ambition to find out. But it happened, like it does to most; someone wandered in with determination, asked me what my birthday was, told me my star sign and proceeded to read aloud my horoscope. I was riding shotgun in an unfamiliar car – the journey predetermined, my path unknown – but it was kind of exciting.
“Pleasure enjoys top billing. Friendships are richer and your social life more vibrant. You’re in the market for new love, and friends are a great source of introduction. This one will be special; the bad has passed and the good is on its way. Travel is a possibility.”
As he read it aloud, the very same smile I had earlier crept across my colleagues face. He knew there was relevance; he saw that thing we call correlation. I glanced back and forth at the piece of paper. The words were mass-produced nonsense, but maybe something made sense. Perhaps somewhere in those 41 stabs of prose lay an inspiring clump of truth, a beacon of hope that resonated with my current state, though perhaps I was just looking for something that wasn’t there.
“How do you feel about that?” he asked.
“Some of it hits home”
“I told you”
“Told me what?”
“These things can be spot on”
“They can be”
“It sounds pretty spot on to me” he grimaced. He knew a lot of those words applied.
“I guess so, but plenty of the words don’t apply”
“It’s a line of best fit, mate”
“I guess that’s like most things in life”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing’s perfect, right?”
The cynic in me started to creep out of my pores. Did the right outweigh the wrong? Was this tacky piece of text telling me something I already knew? Was I silly for even considering these questions? Who the fuck reads horoscopes anyway? I wasn’t a 65-year-old single woman with a cat obsession, so rationale would make it hard to justify being even remotely moved by a tiny little dribble of correlation between my life and a bunch of words some stranger who worked a nine-to-five office job wrote on a hungover Monday. But that’s emotion, isn’t it? Sometimes you throw caution to the wind and accept the beauty of possibility.
Though perhaps I was looking into it more than I needed to. Maybe the horoscope didn’t have to give me anything other than that little sliver of hope I’d always wanted, because after all, it’s the only thing you have when there’s nothing else left; you strip all the beauty out of life and all that remains for your hands to grasp is that precious four letter word: hope.
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Sammy Attwood is the co-founder of Your Friend’s House. His favourite meal is brunch and he is Twitter-illiterate six days of the week. You can follow him on Instagram if you want, right here.
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