I was in New York to visit my friend, M, who had moved there a year earlier. She had an apartment with a spare mattress and I had a terrible fear of being alone over the holidays. It was a match made in heaven.

Except now it was the night before Christmas and I was alone. We’d made tentative plans to meet in Chinatown but she hadn’t responded to any of my texts or calls since my plane had landed a few hours earlier.

Against all odds, panic had yet to set in. I had greater priorities – such as visiting Magic Jewelry, a new-agey joint specialising in aura photographs of the kind taken of everyone from Lorde to Diane von Furstenberg, their faces obscured by a melange of rainbow hues that supposedly telegraphed their emotional state.

I walked into the store. The space was very small and every few minutes a camera flash would detonate like lightning – so bright and blinding it felt religious. Then it was my turn. I placed my hands on two metal plates said to hold an electrical current. The lens clicked and I was handed a photo. My eyes were half-closed and purple splotches bruised across my face.

I approached the counter and gave my photo to a woman, who pointed to one section of the purple that looked the same as all the others. “Something bad is going to happen,” she said cheerily.

The panic I had suppressed suddenly arose in a terrible surge. “Where are you??” I texted M. It wasn’t dramatic enough. I wanted her to think of me as a hapless Victorian orphan roaming the rainy streets alone. I added two skulls and multiple shivering emojis.

My phone buzzed. It wasn’t M. It was a Hinge notification from a man whose two primary traits were his height (allegedly 6ft 2in) and his sunglasses (comically oversized, concealing most of his face in each photo). All his answers were off-putting. I was totally enamoured.

“You are cute,” his message read. The thrill of a new city emboldened me. “What are you doing right now?” I responded. I was 19 and had no conception of romance, but I hoped he might invite me to his parents’ manor for the holidays where we would have a series of comedic misunderstandings before kissing under the mistletoe. We could have a spring wedding at his farm upstate.

My reverie was interrupted by his reply. He was at a bar 30 minutes away (forgivable) and playing Scrabble (unforgivable). I thought of various seven-letter words as I heaved my luggage down the wet pavement. Fatigue. Tragedy. Mistake. I arrived at the Scrabble bar, where I saw many tall, lanky men but no oversized sunglasses. “Here!” I messaged him. The place smelled like petrol. I refreshed the app and found that he had blocked me.

I closed my eyes and considered each pathway spiralling before me. I could try to pull a Macaulay Culkin and scam my way into the Plaza hotel – if only I had my dad’s credit card. I could pull a Zooey Deschanel and romance a hapless elf – if only I could find a man in yellow tights. I could pull a Meg Ryan and give it my best moan over sandwiches – if only I liked pastrami.

Despondent, I circled the block. I pressed the purple photograph between my palms and prayed for the first time since my brief stint at a Catholic school.

“Dear God, help me,” I whispered. “And also, happy birthday,” I added, just in case.

No sooner had I unclasped my hands than the phone rang. It was M, screeching down the line. “We can see you right now! We’re in the diner! Look!” She was waving her hands like an inflatable tube man.

I bounded across the road to meet her, suddenly feeling like I might cry. We tangled in a flailing embrace; now we were two inflatable tube men.

“What happened?!” I cried. I wanted melodrama: a sordid tale of a Yuletide heist, a grand conspiracy concocted with Scrabble man. Her answer was more prosaic: her phone had died, the diner had lent her a charger.

Maybe the aura reader was wrong. Midnight ticked over and I was celebrating Christmas with my best friend, eating sundaes. Nothing bad had happened at all.

Halfway around the world, someone was shopping at a wet market in Wuhan …