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You were very young, maybe six or seven when you realised something was missing. You couldn't name or place it, just a niggling emptiness at the back of your mind that you couldn't help probing the same way you probed the new spaces in your mouth where your baby teeth used to be.
You are ten when you tell your dad, and he can't explain what it is or what will make it better, and for the first time in your life your dad doesn't have the answers. You feel let down, somehow, even though you know it's not his fault.
Your older sister, Jane, two years your senior, takes you aside and tell you she knows exactly how you feel. It doesn't make the feeling go away, but you feel a little less alone.
You start middle school. You get good grades, you get along fine with the other kids, and that empty space stays there and doesn't go away. You learn to live with it.
A new family moves in next door shortly after your thirteenth birthday, and when you and Jane go over with a cake to welcome them a green-eyed girl answers the door, peering at you curiously through bright-green glasses you feel a shock of recognition, even though you know you've never met this girl before.
You get the same feeling from her stepbrother, who stares at your sister with a look of blank incomprehension on his face for a full minute before he snaps out of it, inviting you both inside. Her name is Jade, his is Jake, and within an hour of chatting you are all thick as thieves. The empty feeling yawing at the back of your head feels lesser, somehow.
Jade goes to the same school as you, and the two of you hang out during your lunch break, and after school- When you both move on to high school, it stays the same. You never tell her about that empty feeling, but you know she knows anyway. You lie on your backs in the grass in your yard, and look at the clouds, and she says, "Hey John, do you believe in fate?"
"I dunno." you reply, looking over at her. She doesn't look back, staring thoughtfully up at the clouds.
"I think I might." she says eventually. "I think I might be meant to do something, go somewhere, meet someone maybe. And I haven't done it yet."
You ponder this for a moment. "You're fifteen, you've got time."
In the summer before your senior year, you meet a girl in a coffee shop. She's doing something on her laptop, her head bowed, but when you pass her she raises her head and fixes you with a silver-eyed stare so intense you find yourself rooted to the spot.
"I know you." she says, perfectly calm, and then nods to the seat across from her. "Please, sit down."
You learn her name is Rosalind Lalonde, Rose for short. She lives in New York, and she's in Washington, visiting some family, with her mother and older sister. Her favorite colour is purple, she has a cat named Jaspers, she likes some of the same TV shows and books that you do. You're slightly disconcerted by her eyes- steel-grey, surprisingly warm at times. You get the feeling they should be a different colour.
She ends up coming home with you and sitting in the living room with you, Jane, Jade and Jake, watching television. Her sister comes to pick her up in the evening, and ends up chatting to Jane and Jake for another hour and a half.
The Lalondes come over at least once every week before the summer ends. Even if you're sad they're going, that gaping void in the back of your head has shrunk again, you feel a little less empty. You exchange pesterChums, and promise to keep in touch. They come back the next summer, much to everyone's excitement.
You get a job that same summer, working at a technical bookstore. Jane works at the patisserie across the road, and she brings you a snack halfway through your shift every Saturday. She chats to you until a customer, a lanky man wearing peculiar triangular shades, comes up to the counter to inquire about whether you have anything on HTML, then stops short and looks at you, then at Jane.
You recognise him too, a little, not at much as Jade or Rose but he's still disconcertingly familiar. He's silent a long time before he says, carefully, "Have we met? You look familiar."
You and Jane shake your heads, and he looks troubled for a moment. "I feel like I know you both." he says, and Jane shrugs.
"That happens to us a lot," she says. "We find people we know, even if we've never met them."
He stares at her, a look so completely perplexed that you almost laugh, and gets out his phone, dials a number, and calls somebody, speaking to them in a rapid undertone. When he hangs up, he takes his shades off and rubs his eyes, frowning. When he opens them to look at you both, they're hazel, which seems inexplicably odd to you.
"My little brother." he explains. "He's been looking for these people he's never met all his life."
Ten minutes later, the door swings open and a guy your age in aviators- who the hell wears sunglasses inside, especially aviators, what a dork- walks in, giving his brother a nod and then looks straight at you.
"Dave." comes out of your mouth unbidden, and he stops in his tracks, then walks the rest of the way to the counter and fistbumps you, his lips twitching slightly upwards.
"John." he says, the effect somewhat ruined by the way his voice cracks.
They come home with you after work, and all eight of you take over Jade and Jake's living room. The empty feeling that has knawed at you since you were six is dwindling, and at least now you know you're not alone in that feeling. They were like the childhood friends you had the best of adventures with, friends that somehow you forgot, and you don't know how.
You start college with your friends reachable either in person or by IM, and for the first time in your life, you feel at home in yourself.
You meet Karkat Vantas in your film class, and Vriska Serket at a party. You meet Aradia Megido and Feferi Peixes on vacation to Hawaii, and Sollux Captor when he fixes up your computer. Gamzee Makara works at Jane's patisserie, and you and Vriska read about up-and-coming designer Kanaya Maryam in one of her trashy magazines.
You lie awake one night, the week before your twenty-third birthday, and wonder if Jade was right. If it was fate.
You fall asleep, and you dream about playing a game.