Chapter Text
Daniel should count himself lucky. Armand. From Polynesian Mary’s. I was with Louis. What a fucking blueprint. This way to the soulmate. But Daniel’s always been fascinated by the paradox of it. The implied missed connection. He’s going to meet his soulmate, and they’re not going to talk, and then they’re going to run into each other later. Sure, happens all the time. People meet and remeet all the time. Except that Daniel knows that he’s going to miss them, which should logically mean that he won’t miss them. How could he ever pass them up for long enough to meet again? Isn’t that just like fate, to tell him in no uncertain terms that if he wants to find his soulmate, he first has to let them go?
It's no wonder, then, that the idea of soulmates had so consumed him. Just a shitty kid on the streets of San Francisco with a tape recorder and the same question, over and over: “So, have you met them yet?”
It should be boring, but if Daniel’s going to lose interest it’s not going to be for a long time. He’s enraptured by the invisible strings of fate, thinking about chance encounters and misunderstandings. The laughter and shared looks of couples who found each other, the wistful sighs and hesitant speculation from those still waiting. The movies make it all seem the same, an endless parade of inoffensively pretty people bumping into each other at a café, but Daniel’s filled a storage unit with tapes and not one of the stories he’s captured resembles any of the others. His mother used to tell him he was too in love with love, that it would get him into trouble, that he needed to be in love with his actual soulmate, not the idea of having one. And she would know, wouldn’t she, her of the half-empty bed and bimonthly checks, but hers is just one story and there are so many out there, and Daniel can’t wait to see the shape of his.
This is what Daniel thinks about his soulmark when he’s on just the right cocktail of drugs and optimism and sweet summer wind to feel philosophical. Most of the time he squints at the elegant script and thinks, “I’m not even gay, though.”
He’d tried it, obviously. First out of curiosity, then out of a teenage sense that he needed the practice, then for a story, then for drugs. And it just felt very… normal. He would know if he were gay, because it would have felt huge. It didn’t. He was 13 convincing a boy in his homeroom to kiss him behind the bleachers – just to see! Come on dude, I’ve seen your words, we’re both probably homos, you don’t want your soulmate to think you’re a dumb virgin, do you? – and it just felt like mouths pressing into one another. Nothing profound. Daniel found himself slightly disappointed. So he would know, if he were gay. It’s going to be awkward to explain that to his soulmate, but hey. It’s fate, right? Surely the guy will understand.
In the circles Daniel frequents in San Francisco, the young and beautiful and drug-addled have taken to wearing bracelets to cover their soulmarks. Some hippie notion of choosing love instead of having it chosen for you. He knew a girl who got blackout drunk every night so she’d forget her soulmate’s first words and be able to get to know them on her own. (She found her soulmate in a corner store, both terribly hungover, reaching for the same bag of salt and vinegar chips.) Daniel doesn’t quite go in for their notions of romance, but he adopts the bracelet anyway. It helps him fit in, and besides, he doesn’t need anyone trying to track down this Armand guy and ruining the whole thing for him.
He spends endless midnights debating the fate of the universe with grad students in shitty studio apartments and basement clubs and beneath highway overpasses. A pretty astrophysicist tells him about superpositions and quantum entanglement. A theology postdoc tells him it’s proof of God. A girl with eyeliner that matches her lipstick blinks at him slowly and says “But if you did know who your soulmate was, if you had already met, how would you do it? What would you say?” She smiles kind of sheepishly, the way people so often smile around Daniel, like they can’t believe what they’re letting slip. “Sometimes I think I’ll be too afraid,” she confesses, “They’ll say my words and I’ll just freeze. I’ll just let them get away.”
It's a Thursday night when Daniel turns down an unfamiliar street and sees a sign that reads Polynesian Mary’s and he thinks he understands. The hippie crowd is wrong about fate. He could choose to leave. Nobody is making him do anything. He could get on a bus tonight and never come back to this city. But Daniel Molloy has always been in love with love, so he goes inside.