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It’s a simple fact of life: these strings of light tether you to your beloved, your soulmate, The One. You first learn about it when you’re a small child, and then you spend the rest of your life seeking out every avenue of opportunity to find whose string of light matches with yours. They come in all shades and gleams, but you only know they’re meant to be when the light melts together into the same color. Soothing ceruleans, forest greens, buttery yellows, clementines, rainbow-sheened silvers–there are as many colors as there are couples to tie together, and the universe provides amply.
Mike is twelve when he first meets his soulmate.
He’d spent the better part of that year meditating on the color green, and how sometimes, when he and Will walked side by side in the hallways, the lights tied loosely around their fingers would intersect and create such a vibrant shade of the color that he could never quite hold it in his mind. He’d try to compare it to budding leaves or lily pads or patches of grass, and nothing ever came close to the blissfully torturous experience that was seeing such a beautiful color. He’d thought it meant something better than soulmates: the combination of two things to create something new.
Which is why it was so jarring on the first day of seventh grade, when the new girl walked into Mr. Clarke’s classroom, said her name was El, and Mike noticed the color of light tied around her finger, because it was the same color he saw every day on his own hand.
When she sat in the desk behind him, and the lights instinctively drew together, looping into a beautiful, seamless line of sapphire, she noticed with slight disinterest.
Neither of their hearts fluttered in their chests, nor did they seem particularly thrilled by the matter.
“Oh,” is all they said.
And for years after that, that was all it amounted to: they grew together because that’s what you’re supposed to do–it’s what the lights drawing together meant, after all. Mike tries to make the best of it and laughs and smiles his way through awkward dates and even more awkward kisses, and he grows used to the idea of his life being a haze of sapphire light.
He tries to not think about the color green.
And it works, too, except for those moments, grown fewer and far between now, when he and Will pass each other in the hall, offer stiff greetings to each other, and those thin strands of light intersect once more.
Will is nineteen when he first meets his soulmate.
He and Mike haven’t been as close since El– Mike’s soulmate–showed up, and Will’s a little relieved when he can finally check this thing off of his list so he can move on with his life.
His name is David. He’s in the same Introduction to Art History class Will’s in, and when their sunshine-colored strands of light snap together that first day of their freshman year of college, Will feels an underwhelming stuttering in his chest. It feels a little like disappointment, especially when he watches the light connect and form an unbreakable bridge of yellow, none of those shades of green he’d become enraptured with over the years.
Oh.
David raises his eyebrows and offers an awkward grin in return. They both shyly chuckle, and they make it through the lecture before David stops him after class and offers his hand out for a shake.
“I guess this is the start of the rest of our lives, huh?” he says.
Will smiles back, but it feels painful to contort his face like this. That disappointment balloons in his chest once more when he watches their hands clasp together, and that yellow light shines steady between their fingers.
He misses the color green.
Mike and El’s wedding is an informal affair; Will and David also show up with matching rings, though nobody asks when theirs will be.
Human laws are fickle in that way, even in a world where the universe tells you who’s meant to be together.
If you ask their friends and family, who all sit entangled in similar strands of light, they’ll say everything is as it should be, that the universe has paired its people up just as it always has, that this is the best for everyone involved, and nothing could be better than this.
All four of the people in their sordid webs of light yellow and blue would disagree, though, and not for lack of trying. They fall into their routines, peck kisses on cheeks and intertwine their fingers when they walk down streets. Mike and Will try to love these people, and El and David try to not think about how their partners’ hearts clearly beat out of tune with theirs. Will’s designs become endless shades of green, and no matter how many times David asks if he’s found the right one, Will never seems satisfied and resorts to spending hours more in his studio; when El asks why Mike writes poems about green eyes, he says it’s just a metaphor, or that he’s searching for something else.
Could the universe have made a mistake?
This universe had made a mistake.
At least, that’s what El says the day she moves out, arms crossed over her chest and hurt in her eyes. She’s going to stay with Max–they’ve always been closer, and whenever they’ve been together, Mike’s noticed El being enchanted by the way their red and blue strings tangle together into magenta-laced futility in the same way he’d always been enchanted by those shades of green he’s forever chasing.
David says something similar a thousand miles away, leaning against the doorway to Will’s studio with a box resting on his hip and hurt in his eyes. He says he doesn’t understand, and how could it not work out, and weren’t soulmates supposed to love each other through everything?
Will’s already tried apologizing, but it doesn’t make a difference in how much pain he knows David is in. He could say sorry a million times, and it’d probably only add up to make the pain that much worse.
So he stays silent. His canvas is green, and there’s green on his hands, and when the door slams behind the person who was supposed to be his soulmate, he breathes a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to see any more of that shade of yellow clinging to his fingers than what he has to.
Just as fast as the two couples come together, they fall apart.
Just as fast as they fall apart, Mike and Will’s paths cross again.
It starts with a phone call that clangs in Will’s hollow apartment in New York City. Green paint transfers from his hands to the phone when he picks it up and asks in a flat tone, “Hello?”
Seven hundred miles away in Chicago, Mike’s hunched over a notebook with yet another poem about chlorophyll, moss, and pine needles. He’s surrounded by crumpled up paper that litters his couch and the floor, a trail that leads straight from his apartment’s living room to the bedroom with a chest of drawers filled only with his clothes now.
“Will?” Mike asks.
“Mike?” Will echoes back.
Grins poke at both of their mouths. Their strings of light still hang half-dead by their sides, but each looks down just then, and they imagine those points of intersection: walking down halls together, laughing in the back of classrooms, what life could’ve been like if they hadn’t let their lives be dictated by something as small as colored light and a universe that supposedly has their best interests in mind.
And they make a choice, just then.
“How would you describe the color green?” Mike asks.
Will stares down at his hands, how every conceivable shade of the color marks his hands haphazardly, and he chuckles. He wiggles his fingers against the dying rays of sunlight eking through the window, and he says, “What if I could show you instead?”
It only takes ten hours of driving from Chicago to New York, so long as you’re consistently going twenty miles above the speed limit.
There’s just a backpack in Mike’s front seat and several empty to-go cups of coffee crunched and carelessly tossed on the floor. He’s got five notebooks piled in the backseat, a random assortment of clothes in his backpack, and a head that spins when he thinks of being near Will once again. He tries to describe the color green the whole time, but every time he drags the question to the center of his focus, it slides away once more to thinking about the empty spaces of an unfulfilled life and his growing belief that predestination does not exist, but simply the choices one makes.
Will greets him with jubilation at the door. He’s been painting all day–there’s wet paint on his hands, but he still lets his fingers slip against the door latch and the knob, and he doesn’t care that his t-shirt has several holes around the collar and near the bottom hem. When he opens the door, Mike looks just as disheveled, like he hasn’t slept in years.
“I missed you,” is the first thing Mike says. His string of light looks faint, a barely-glowing sapphire blue.
Will says nothing in return. He slips his hand against Mike’s collar, a forest green staining from his fingers to the shirt’s material, and he pulls him close.
When Mike stares down, he notices that sunshine-yellow thread of light tugging against his. Where they intersect, he sees those beautiful shades of green: ever-shifting, multitudinous, of a depth the universe couldn’t create on its own, but forced by the hands of two people against the its decrees.
And in the moment, Mike and Will decide that the universe can make mistakes, that color and light do not get to dictate who is meant to be with whom, and that when they wrap their arms around each other, and their hands become encased in green light, they think they’ve found on their own whatever the universe had failed in dragging them towards instead.
Because, in the end, soulmates are not a work of the supernatural nor made through concession: they are made when the very orders of heaven and earth are torn apart in the name of preserving love, when people spit at the universe and say You cannot know my heart.
In the end, soulmates are made, not a passive state of nature thrust upon humanity by the universe. They are a yellow and blue string tangling together to become green, disharmony turning into something new and wonderful.