Slayun!!

You shook your head disapprovingly, reading the magazine pages before you with renewed concentration. The palmistry today was no good: the only people with that many wrinkles on their hands had to be approaching their century year mark. Humming, you redirected your gaze to the horoscope pages. Today, you should avoid the colour orange and take your chance- luck is in the air! Well, it was always nice to have a bit of luck on your side, you thought. Looking for Kaiser’s, you grinned. Beware of the old woman in black. Misfortune lies ahead.

You nodded approvingly, looking at Kaiser smugly. “Well Mihya, you’re just salty because your horoscope’s not as good as mine.”

Kaiser scowled, snatching your magazine and placing it on the table, just as you were setting your gaze upon a particularly interesting section- Your soulmate may be closer than you think! 

You glared, temporarily sitting up in indignation before flopping back to your original position, blowing a few stubborn strands of hair off your face. 

Kaiser groaned in exasperation. “You’re stupid to think that some sort of greater being out there controls our lives. Why would you even want them to, anyways? Chances are they’ll just be yet another shitty god.”

“Optimism, my dear Michael,” you grinned, gesturing with your hands wildly. “Fate has to be real, as evidenced by the fact that you have such an amazing best friend.”

The man in question rolled his eyes at you, letting out a huff of exasperation. The pair of you had always been this way: you were the starry eyed romantic and Michael your cynical skeptic.

He called you gullible, naive; unable to let go of your childhood fantasies, saying it with such comic disdain in his voice that you couldn’t help mock glaring at him every time. Somewhere down along the line of your friendship, he had decided to take it upon himself to keep you from falling for the ‘impossible shit’ of people. Whatever you did he would be there, a tall scowling figure looming behind you. You had told him time and time again that you were a fully functioning adult now, that you’d be fine on your own, that you most definitely would not get scammed out of all your life savings. It was simply that you liked believing in pre-destiny, liked believing that everything would be okay. That someone out there was taking care of everyone.

Michael was just worried that you’d dive headfirst into the first cult you crossed paths with.

AGE 6

It’s two days past your birthday when a strange man came into your kindergarten. His clothes were strange: black robes neatly ironed with an odd white collar around his neck. You, along with the rest of your class, watched wonderingly as the man cleared his throat and turned towards you all, smiling. He introduced himself as ‘Father Frederick’, telling your class that he was a priest sent from the Church to talk to you about God, about religion. The fidgeting kid beside you muttered under her breath.

“You’re not my dad,” she said bluntly to the growing giggling. The man ignored her.

The weirdly dressed man talked on for too long, you thought, about things that did not interest you in the slightest. You were 6: what need did you have for a man with ugly clothes to come into your classroom and tell you about God and his rules? You had your own rules- listen to your parents, don’t talk to strangers; don’t drink hand sanitizer.

Until he talked of soulmates. 

You perked up, intrigued at the new word, only to realise that you’d missed the man’s explanation of the curious word when you were daydreaming. 

The strange man left 10 minutes later, black robes flapping.                     

“So,” you said to the girl next to you, “did you hear what a soulmate was?”

Your current best friend nodded at you, her fingers sticky with paint just like you. Now 14 years from then, you could no longer recollect her name.

 “It’s when you’re meant to be with someone else. I asked my parents at dinner yesterday and they said that they were soulmates,” she said proudly, puffing out her little chest. Her voice was assured, full of that immature confidence that kids your age tended to have. 

Michael, sat next to you, scoffed. He was taller than you, his blonde hair frizzy and wild. There was paint streaked on his face and scrapes on his hands. Years later, you would remember the boy as one of the first people that you could remember meeting, but when you were six, he was just the tall, annoying kid that sat next to you. He wasn’t someone you disliked in your class, just a sarcastic six year old that seemed to know so much more than any of you. The boy whose parents never came to pick him up. The boy who never took part in any of the class make-believes. 

“It’s not real. Just because someone tells you it is, doesn’t mean it’s true,” he said.

Your friend gasped in indignation. “I don’t lie! It is real, okay?!” She turned to you, grinning. “Mommy says there’s signs. I’ll show you later.”

“Oooo, what sort of signs?” you replied.

Michael looked at you incredulously, as if shocked that you were willing to believe your friend. You frowned at him. So what?

Your friend shrugged. “Don’t know. I’ll ask my mom later.”

The following day, your friend came clutching a glossy magazine page, coloured in bright hues. Detailed on the page were all the signs that you had met your soulmate. The pair of you analysed the pages with fascination in every possible pocket of time for at least a week, highlighting and underlining the sections you deemed important- although you could barely read all the words, let alone comprehend their meaning. 

The following week, your friend began a new obsession with unicorns and ponies, and the magic of soulmates was completely erased from her mind. You however, carried the magazine page everywhere you went until the page, previously glossy and vibrant was left faded and torn. Then you copied down the page onto another sheet of paper, writing painstakingly slowly in your neatest handwriting. It lived in your desk from then on: The Signs that you’ve met your soulmate- and that he’s closer than you think!, written with pink and purple glittery pen on pink sugar paper.

AGE 10

“I hate pickles,” you scowled, nose scrunched up as you looked at the very last slice of pizza on the table- one heaped with the nasty green things.

It was a school disco, and the food that had been stacked in piles on the table was now almost entirely depleted as the end of the night drew near. Now, why it was decided that pickles were a good idea on pizza? You truly couldn’t see how the people who decided it came to that conclusion. Only a select few toppings belonged on pizza, in your very humble opinion. That was, pepperoni and cheese. 

A girl from your class, Julia, stood next to you. Looking at your reluctance, she clapped her hands in delight. “I love pickles! I’ll pick them off, and then you can have the pizza.”

In the end, you swore you could still taste the pickle juice that was probably soaked into the cheese, but it was miles better than what it would have been like, you thought. From then on, you found a new best friend in Julia, close to the point of inseparability. Where she went, you went and vice versa. Sleepovers were scheduled on weekends, play dates and dinner in the holidays. You were meant to be together, you decided. After all, soulmates weren’t always romantic.

You and Michael still talked-or perhaps it was more accurate to say that you chattered at him while he occasionally butted in with a rebuttal and a sarcastic remark. Julia joined in with your conversations sometimes. Julia didn’t like Michael. Julia doesn’t like most boys, to be honest, saying that they’re gross and carry disgusting ‘boy germs’. You think that boys are gross too, since Julia thinks so.

You sat, huddled in a ball under the shadow of the trees around you. Your current spot, the middle of a circle of plum trees, made for a rather good hiding spot, you thought. Nobody had bugged you in your little corner until you felt a shadow above you; looking up, you found a scowling Michael standing above. Of course he found me, you thought, angrily wiping away the tears on your damp cheeks. 

“…what happened,” he asked, sounding reluctant. 

His cheeks were flushed rosily, his hair wild- he had most likely been running around with the other boys. Refusing to look up, you shrugged and began shredding a leaf onto the floor, the grass already heaped with the remnants of your habit. Michael sighed, looking up at the sky.

“Julia said she doesn’t want to be friends with me anymore,” you said, rubbing your knee with a piece of grass. “She says I’m not cool enough for her.”

Julia liked pickles. You didn’t. It was on the soulmate list- you were meant to be best friends, so how could she discard you so readily?

Michael was quiet, toe scuffing into the ground. Sniffling, you continued tearing leaves.

 Suddenly- “Shut up, Sunshine. That’s stupid. You’re the coolest person I know.”

You finally looked up at him, and his face softened. 

“Really?” you whispered.

“Mhmm.” He stretched his hand out to you. “Want to come play football with the weird boys?”

You glared at him, watching as the boy broke out into laughter.

“You can watch,” he said, grinning. “You know what? I won’t play and I’ll watch with you instead. Happy?”

You sniffed and took his hand with one of yours, while the other wiped the last traces of tears away. “Happy enough.”

AGE 12

The morning was bright, light streaming in through the windows. The merry chirping of birds floated through the room while you sat placidly eating your bowl of cereal on the kitchen island. 

“Are you and Dad soulmates?” You directed the question to your mother, watching her wiping down the countertops. A half-eaten piece of toast lay on a plate, and her mug of tea was also only half drunk. Turning to look at you, she put down the cloth and smiled warmly. “What do you mean, sweetheart?” 

“You know when you and Dad met. Did you just get a feeling? Like, that he was the one you were going to spend the rest of your life with?”

She laughed. “Definitely not. We were as different as you could possibly be! I mean, I completely hated his guts for the first few months, and he didn’t even talk to me until a year after.”

You stared at her in surprise. “But then why did you marry him? What changed?”

Gazing wistfully into the distance, she chuckled. “He peeled my orange for me.” She grinned, staring into her mug. “When he asked me for an orange and I said yes, he’d peeled it for me when he gave it to me.”

You laughed in delight, clapping. “Because you hate peeling oranges!”

“Bingo,” your mother agreed. “I just need you to remember that love isn’t always about the sudden feelings: it’s what a person does that matters. Their actions. The choices we make, how they make you feel special. So don’t spend your entire life waiting for a sign from the stars, okay? Just notice, sweetheart.”

AGE 15

You were 15 when you got your first boyfriend: Oskar. Oskar was on the basketball team; he had dark hair, a deep voice and a smile that made 15 year old you weak at the knees. Oskar didn’t like pickles like you, but he had a group of moles arranged in a shape that vaguely resembled a squashed heart, and if you looked closely enough, you had a matching birthmark on the underside of your bicep on your left arm. Grinning like an idiot, you stood in front of the mirror, gazing at the birthmark that he had pointed out earlier. 

He was your first kiss too: after he kissed you for the first time, whilst dropping you off outside your house, you stared at your lips in the mirror for hours too. You thought that something must have changed- you must look different. After all, a boy had showed you his action of love. No one had ever kissed you before, but Oskar hadn’t seemed to mind, laughing and calling you ‘sweet’ before silencing your endless rambling with his lips on yours. 

Your parents thought you were too young; you dated him anyways. You went on group dates, to the movies, the park, the mall nearby: the first time you felt like you had really grown up into a teenager, not the excited 10 year old with the pigtails.

Michael had grown up too:  but he was still tall and blonde, and he still looked down at you with that infuriatingly sarcastic glance. 

The two of you were sat in your backyard, your legs outstretched, basking in the sun. Michael was under an umbrella, squinting in the light as he turned to look at you, eyebrow cocked. 

“So,” he asked you, “do you really like that Oskar guy?” His leg bounced, fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. 

“Obviously,” you said proudly. “I think he’s my soulmate.”

Michael clicked his tongue, head tilting as he looked at you. “Why’d you think that?”

“Our birthmarks are the same,” you said matter of factly, nodding at him with a straight face.

Michael clicked his tongue, long fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. You looked at him wonderingly, his face looking rather troubled.

“There’s no reason to be worried, Mihya.”

The boy in question gave you a dirty look. “Who said I was worried? But you can’t deny the fact that he’s an absolute arsehole.”

The swear word comes out of his mouth as easily as breathing. Michael’s been playing football even more than before, not that you thought that was possible anyways.  He had been scouted into the Bastard München youth team. According to him, the boys at the youth team had an extensive arsenal of curses at their disposal, choosing to use them much more often than not.

As blindsided as you were by love, you did have to admit it: at times, Oskar wasn’t the nicest person to almost everyone. 

“He’s not an arse to me,” you protested, “and besides, isn’t that all that matters? I don’t get why you have such a problem with him!”

Saying nothing, Michael just looked at you, something twitching in his jaw. Letting out a long suffering sigh he reached out, patting you on the head. You laughed and reached out to ruffle his hair in turn, surprised when you weren’t met with any protests. 

He said nothing, simply leaning into your touch with a lean of his head.

Oskar broke up with you a month and a half later, admitting to cheating on you with a cruel smirk on his face.

Michael was the one who brought you flowers when you sat, barricaded in your room. Michael was the one who silently left, exchanging the flowers for bread because when you saw him, you had thrown a pillow at his head and demanded through your tears that he got you something that you could actually eat. Michael was the one who sat by your side, a hand on your shoulder even as you cried. Michael didn’t question, didn’t say the ever dreaded I told you so. 

Michael just stayed.

When your family moved to the States, you waved a cheery goodbye at the airport, trying to stay strong: both of you were (you could swear that you saw him discreetly wiping a tear though). On the plane, you cried yourself to sleep, harder than you ever did about Oskar. Was Michael crying as hard as you were right now, you wondered?

Your dreams end up being full of tears too. 

AGE 18

University was overrated: you were promised fun, a new chapter of your life starting; the golden time! That was why you’d worked so hard for it, anyways.

Now in university, you had no idea if those promises really were true except for everyone else, but for you it was most certainly not. So far, all university had come with was stress, caffeine addiction and dark circles that couldn’t be covered by any amount of concealer.

One thing you did gain however, was a new friend. Your roommate Lily was born on the same day as you, the same hour and the same minute. You find out on your second day sharing a room. It’s fate, destiny, written in the stars. The stars after all were aligned in exactly the same position when the two of you were brought into the world.

Michael, although dismissive of your written in the stars spiel, does admit that it is an interesting coincidence. You were on the phone with him, telling him about your first week at university. He was still in Germany, now some sort of hotshot football player, but despite the distance, you still talked a lot. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and so on. 

You and Lily weren’t the same major; in fact, you didn’t have a single class together. In spite of that, the two of you became inseparable in university circles. You met up for breaks, studied together, binge watched movies together on the weekends. When you were invited to your first party, you brought Lily with you. Your closets became one, your stationery moved between your pencil cases.

Lily’s family lived by the beach in California, and when you stayed with her family for a week during the winter break, you took ample use of the opportunity to bask in the sun, unlike the cold weather of Massachusetts. Michael texted you all the while, asking when you would be coming back to Germany- I hope being an Ivy League girl hasn’t blown your ego up, Sunshine- you better still have time for me when you come back. 

When you go back to your childhood home, he was standing by the kitchen counter as if he had been there all along. He was scoffing and pushing you off when you threw yourself on him, trying to act impassive. 

“Why would I even miss you,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You may be some sort of a genius, but I’m still better than you, you know.”

You know he’s lying, that he missed you just as much as you missed him. It’s written all over his face, especially with that stupid grin.

Lily ended up visiting your family later in the break, the two of you squealing and jumping for joy when you picked her up from the airport. 

A few days into her stay, you introduced her to Michael at a barbecue. That ended up causing your first fight.

“No, you don’t get it- there is no way that that man is not in love with you!”

Lily had been insisting for the past half hour from her place on the air mattress on your bedroom floor now. You were very much beginning to regret your decision to introduce Lily and Michael now after all the time she had spent stubbornly pointing out the apparently obvious signs.

“That hand on your shoulder,”

“The way he bent down to listen to you”

“Oh God, you need to see how that man looks at you! You are starving that poor guy right now.”

You huffed in exasperation, looking at Lily drily.

“No, Lily, he is not in love with me. Men and women can just be friends you know, and that’s all we are. Really good friends.”

Lily shook her head emphatically. “No, no, no. This isn’t just a case of you’re really good friends! You are not just friends!”

“Are.”

“Not!”

You glared down at your friend, before giving up and rolling so that you were facing the wall instead of her stubborn gaze. Lily cackled as you did so, pointing an accusatory finger at you. 

“So you admit it, witch!”

You threw a pillow at her. 

When Lily left a few days later, Michael was waiting behind you impatiently, having come to drop the two of you off before practice. He nodded stiffly at your grinning friend, who was energetically wagging her eyebrows in your direction. Groaning, you waved her off as she disappeared into her gate.

When the two of you came back to campus, Lily was insufferable, badgering you constantly as to when your relationship with the blonde was going to develop. Much to your dislike, she seemed to have gotten into a habit of doing her daily check in front of as many people as possible; also in the loudest voice she could possibly muster. 

She gives up after about a month of persistent complaining, and your friendship goes back to normal. Lily ends up finding a soulmate of her own when she hits him with her car after driving back from her successful driver’s test. She insists that it was love at first sight, although the poor guy ended up with a fractured foot and a broken bicycle. It’s okay though, you think. He looks at Lily with the sweetest eyes when he thinks she isn’t looking, and they’re a cute couple. It’s just what she deserves.

At the start of the year, you and Lily had talked about spending the summer holiday somewhere warm, somewhere exotic. Backpacking in South America had almost been a certainty. But Lily ended up going home with her new soulmate, and you wondered: when would that kind of preordained love come your way? 

Instead, you booked a flight home to see Michael, who somehow managed to make time for you despite his ungodly schedule. For the month that you’re there, he transforms from football player to personal chauffeur and tour guide, slipping back into the role of best friend easily. Again, you cry when you part ways at the airport. Again, he does the same but tries not to let it show. 

You end up having a new roommate next year, Lily having moved in with her new boyfriend. She doesn’t have the same immediate click with you. 

But you think that it’s okay now.

AGE 21

You’re in Germany yet again, from money scraped from tutoring and part time jobs. It’s your 21st birthday, and Michael’s teammates dragged the two of you to a nightclub at the heart of Munich. Music blares, the lights throb, and you feel weirdly out of place in your silver ‘disco ball dress’, as like to call it, amongst all the artistically draped and torn fishnets the German people your age love to wear. Most unfortunately, since your move to the States, you had become deprived of ‘true culture’, as Michael called it, and was now ‘severely Americanised’.

Michael had disappeared into the club somewhere to close the tab. Don’t get into trouble, he had said before he left. 5 hours into clubbing, you feared that you wouldn’t be able to get into trouble even if you wanted to. Your feet stung, covered with blisters from your heels. The techno music and strobe lights had begun to give you a headache, and for some reason, your usual persistent headache was transforming into stabbing pains behind your eyes. You grimaced, rubbing your head. 

“No, Romeo and Juliet were the greatest love story of all time! I mean, think of all the tragedy.”

You perked up at the mention of Shakespeare, head whipping around to try finding the discussion. Although constantly teased about it by your friends, you’d chosen to study English Literature at university. Now, if anything in a nightclub was right up your alley, this most definitely was. And from the sounds of it, someone understood your appreciation of Shakespeare.

You pinpointed your eyes towards a man and a woman sat on a table. The man was still talking emphatically, but the woman looked rather disgruntled. You smiled at the sight. Until-

“Juliet had to lay everything down for Romeo, don’t you get it? That’s just the duty of a woman. And then you get the crazy ones like Lady Macbeth. That man Shakespeare really knows how to write a good woman though, I admit.” The woman with the man was looking very uncomfortable, shifting awkwardly whilst looking around herself continuously.

You frowned, disgusted. How dare this raging misogynist come out to spout his ludicrous opinions and disrespect Shakespeare’s name in the process? Furious and spurned on by the alcohol, you stumbled over to their table. 

The man looked up, confused. “What do you want?” He asked, sounding suspicious.

Hands on your hips, you glared at him as the woman looked at you, sighing in relief.

“I just heard your conversation,” you said, speech embarrassingly slow but thankfully coherent. “I just wanted to ask- what makes you think that you have the right to come out here and confidently voice those horrible opinions? Don’t you think that we deserve to be respected too?”

The man spluttered for breath, evidently shocked. You better keep this short, you thought. Too long and your feet might actually give up on you from the torturous heels.

“What the hell are you doing?! This isn’t any of your business whatsoever-“

You raised your voice, cutting across the man. “I’m not finished! And also, what do you mean Juliet had to lay everything down for Romeo? Yes, I agree it was a tragedy, but that was clear from the exposition! I mean, come on, they’re introduced as coming ‘from forth the fatal loins of these two foes’. But it really shouldn’t be romanticised! I mean, they were just two teenagers madly in love, although Romeo’s intentions are a bit dubious at the start, considering his age and previous record but-“

You felt a large, warm hand clamp at your wrist pull you back, disrupting your rambling. You stumbled, crashing into a broad back as you frowned. Michael glared down at you. You glared just as hard back. 

Peeking out from behind his back, you caught sight of the misogynistic rager, who seemed to have been rendered speechless by your less than conventional rant. Unable to see Michael’s face, you opened your mouth once again, hand still clutching the back of his shirt for fear that your sore feet would give up on you. 

“And when it comes to-“

Once again you were cut short as Michael dragged you out of the club. You protested, your headache still hammering in your head.

“Hey, Mihya! I wasn’t finished with Juliet, and you stopped me before I could even get to Lady Macbeth!“

Michael looked at you, clearly unimpressed. He cleared his throat. “And what part of don’t get into trouble do you not understand?”

You ignored him, crossing your arms and sitting on the pavement before flashing him a middle finger. You fiddled with the hem of your dress, looking at the sprawling buildings in front of you. Sighing, Michael sat down next to you, your head immediately making its way onto his shoulder.

“I’m a fighter, not a lover.” You grinned, laughing at your own joke. Michael remained unimpressed.

“You don’t need to fight, you know,” he muttered. “I’ll fight them for you.”

You tutted disapprovingly. “Nah, I like fighting. We can take turns though- for when I get tired.” You kicked your leg. “You can beat them up with a kick. ‘Cause of football. You can just wallop them. Pow pow.”

He chuckled slightly at that, and the two of you fell into comfortable silence. Silently, you watched the cars go by, yawning.

“It just sort of got to me,” you murmured. “The way that we’re always expected to do everything. I’m just scared, I guess. Scared that once I’m in a relationship, I’ll be the one who has to do everything.”

You kicked a rock out into the road. Michael was watching you with an indecipherable look in his eyes, silent before he replied.

“You shouldn’t be.”

You squinted at him, confused. “Shouldn’t be what?”

“Scared. You’re not that kind of person: you’re the kind of person that people will want to lay everything down for.”

Still confused, you frowned at him. Since when was he this nice to you? Michael was still looking at you with that soft gaze, blue eyes staring intently into your own. He raised a hand, then patted you gently on your back. You felt the weight and the warmth of that familiar hand, smiling at him slowly. 

“Finally,” you said, grinning. “You appreciate my true worth.” 

He shrugged, that familiar smirk of his once again settling over his features. Dusting his hands off on his knees, he stood up. 

“Come on.”

You groaned. The pain in your feet and the throbbing of your head still present, you clumsily got to your feet, rubbing at your heels. Curse these heels, you thought. Why did the ones that look nice always have to hurt the most? Instead of taking a step, you promptly outstretched your arms.

“Carry me,” you stated expectantly. 

Michael narrowed his eyes at you back.

“No. Walk.”

“Yes. Won’t walk.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

The two of you caught the attention of the people walking by, onlookers curiously observing on your spat. To be fair, it was an odd situation with no context. An angry looking blonde with a sparkly girl dressed as a disco ball having a full-blown argument with just two words: ‘yes’ and ‘no’. You glared at your best friend playfully, eyes twinkling. He scoffed back at you, but the corners of his mouth tugged upwards slightly, as if against his will. 

Michael mouthed something that you couldn’t recognise in your drunken haze. Frowning, you moved closer. He ducked his head lower, blonde hair glinting in the moonlight. You felt the gust of air in your ear as he whispered, body angled towards yours.

“No.”

He ended up carrying you home anyways.

AGE 22

You end up going to watch Michael in some sort of massive football match: he flies you out, you go for the opportunity of spending time with your best friend. This is a dream come true for him, you know, and so you spend the 90 minutes screaming at the top of your lungs for him, clutching a gaudy banner with his face on it and decked in so much Kaiser gear that you looked like a walking advert. By the end of the match, your voice is hoarse and your palms red and tingling from clapping. 

When he comes out to meet you, you engulf him in a bear hug and pinch him when he flashes you that infuriating smirk. You’ve been thinking a lot lately, over analysing poetry late at night, over reading sappy romance novels. 

For all your efforts of rummaging through the stars for your perfect match, for all the souls you’d searched for, nothing had emerged. Maybe you weren’t meant to have a soulmate, you thought. Perhaps there truly wasn’t anyone out there for you. 

Letting go from your dreams however, it left room for other dreams to grow. They weren’t thought of, they weren’t forced, but they sprouted and they grew into little bits and pieces of joy. Somewhere along the line, another dream had grown. Now, the flower had bloomed, and it spread, threatening to take over your entire heart. 

For months now, your heart had jumped and missed a beat every time you saw Michael’s texts flood your Notification Centre. You would giggle uncontrollably every time that his name flashed on the screen of your phone. You were beginning to feel that you were growing mad- suddenly all you had in your head was Michael. Michael, Michael, Michael.

Lily teased you relentlessly for your revelation, shrieking at you time to time again to ‘get your man!’. You feel like you’re going mad, because what was this sudden change? 

Maybe your mother was right- love was about the choices you made, after all. You had to be decisive, had to start choosing him. Choose him, no matter what. But would he choose you back?

The following weekend was Lily’s wedding. You’d prepared your speech as the maid of honour, and all there was left to do was to not start bawling in the middle of it. The preparation for the wedding however, was far from uneventful: it was absolute chaos. You and the best man had ran to the florist and the baker respectively, the orders having somehow been mixed up with another couple’s. After having recited the order for the wedding bouquet so many times whilst stood nervously in front of the florist’s counter, you swore that if you had to say ‘tulips’ one more time you might actually break out in stress hives. 

Michael, who Lily had also invited for her ‘last chance to matchmake before becoming a married woman’, was annoyingly unperturbed by the ordeals you had gone through for the wedding. He laughed at your face, flushed from running and joked about having to carry around an XXL pack of tissues for your tears.

Miraculously, the actual wedding day went smoothly, apart from Lily’s one joke about running away at the altar- you and the rest of the bridal party screamed in genuine fear when that joke reached your ears. The flowers were fresh, the cake was moist and chocolatey, and the entirety of the hall was enraptured by the beautiful couple. 

You had already shed too many tears before it was even the time to say your speech, and so you stepped onto the pedestal with slightly damp cheeks. Breathing out slightly, you began.

“I expect everyone here is impatient to dance with the glow sticks, so I’ll keep this short. I met Lily in our first year of university when we were put int a room together by the higher powers of the world. By the way, I am of course referring to the administrative team at our university when I say higher powers. We’ll have to thank Janet from admin for the rest of our lives for this.”

The room chuckled, and you paused before starting again.

“Lily was a first year chemistry student, so she basically chose to torture herself. I was a first year English literature major, so I can’t really say I was better off. I will say though, you can thank me for Lily’s obsession with Pride and Prejudice, Jack,” you said, looking at the groom with a grin. “You’ll probably wake up in the middle of the night to her muttering Mr Darcy and Elizabeth quotes under her breath.”

“Despite her questionable choice in major, there are a few things that I can most definitely say about Lily. One, she is pretty damn good at chemistry. Two, she’s an amazing person. Three, she’s an even better friend.” 

You looked at your friend fondly, smiling at the tears she was hurriedly wiping away. “Lily’s the kind of person who lights up every room she’s in. She’s also the funniest person I’ve ever met- she’s made me laugh so hard that I thought I had appendicitis on multiple occasions. I’m pretty annoyed at you for stealing her Jack, but I do get you. I mean, who wouldn’t want that wonderful lady there?” Jack nodded in agreement, smiling widely.

“Now, these two met in a definitely less conventional way, I think we can agree. I still remember the day that Lily came home crying because she ran over the cutest guy she’d ever seen and she’d ruined her chances with him. By that, I thought she was trying to imply that she had just killed this mystery man,” you said drily. “So you can imagine my relief when she told me that no, she had not just committed manslaughter, and my later joy when I found out that she had somehow managed to make it up to him. Now, we’re here watching them get married, the most sickly in love couple I’ve ever seen, and I think we can all agree that there’s no one who deserves it more than these two here. I’ll be looking forward to watching the rest of your lives progress, and I hope that I’ll have a little corner in your house of dreams as your friend, Lily. Be happy.”

You choked on your last sentence, the tears suddenly coming rushing in. Before you could even step down from the block, you were tackled by Lily, nearly bowled over by her heavy wedding dress. You hugged her back, both of you spluttering absolute nonsense through your tears.

“Congratulations,” said Michael 

sarcastically, “you still have 3 tissues left.”

The wedding was now over, the crowd having sent off the happy couple to their honeymoon. Michael stood next to you in the hotel elevator, still holding that ridiculously large box of tissues. He’d been toting it around the entire day, and although you had adamantly refused to use it at the beginning of the wedding, the box was now almost entirely depleted, much to his amusement. 

You glared at him, eyes still puffy.

“Shut up,” you groaned. 

Laughing, he placed his arm around your shoulders, hugging you into his side. You felt your face grow uncomfortably red, hoping that he didn’t notice.

“It’s okay,” he said dramatically. “I’ll carry around your tissues for you every time.”

The elevator beeped having reached your floor. Walking down the corridor, Michael scanned you into your shared hotel room. Two bedrooms, a couch, a balcony and a kitchen where you had almost set off the fire alarm trying to make scrambled eggs. Yawning, you walked over to the couch and laid, flopping down with a thump. 

Humming quietly, you stared up at the ceiling. Something light landed on your stomach, your fingers automatically reaching for it to feel what it was. 

Your heart caught in your throat, holding up the thing to see an orange. A peeled orange. Michael stood at the stove, fiddling with the stove heat. You couldn’t see his face, but you gulped.

“You peeled it for me,” you whispered.

He turned round to look at you with raised eyebrows. “You hate peeling them,” he said matter of factly, almost bored. “If I didn’t you’d whine for hours about the bits getting caught underneath your nails.”

You stared at him, really looked, the shape of him sharp and angular. His eyes however, were soft as he looked at you with that look you had become accustomed to. You stood up, walking over to him with the orange still held in your hands. Love is an action, your mother had said. 

Silently, you held the orange out to him. Nodding his thanks, he took it. 

“I love you,” you said. “You know, right?”

He rolled his eyes. “Of course you do. Who doesn’t love me?”

You faltered. “No, not like that. Like- “you stopped suddenly. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this. You’d chosen him, but what if he didn’t choose you? What if you just ruined this friendship forever?

It was too late to take it back however, and you watched as the realisation dawned upon him. His mask of indifference chipped away, his eyes going wide and his pupils dilating. His hand stopped in its track, the orange segment still held between his fingers.

“You mean that, right?” He said, voice suddenly hoarse. You nodded shyly. Michael’s face split into a wide grin.

“God, that took you a long time to realise.”

The orange segment dropped onto the carpeted floor as he stepped towards you in the space of a breath, swallowing your gasp of surprise with his lips on yours. Startled, you dropped the rest of the orange. That was okay though, you thought as you wound your arms around his shoulders. He’d peel another one for you without you asking.

It was then that you realised: maybe soulmates were the ones who stayed. Maybe soulmates were the ones who throughout the chronology of all the relationships of your life, would be the ones who were featured in every chapter. 

Somewhere deep in the mess of your drawer in your childhood desk. The edges are taped, and it’s permanently creased from being folded and unfolded a thousand times over. It’s titled The Signs You’ve Met Your Soulmate-and that he’s closer than you think!, scrawled in sparky gel pen. Gently, you took out the piece of paper and smoothed it out, uncapping your purple marker. 

At the bottom of the list, you added a few more points:

-Peels your oranges for you

-Childhood best friend

You start wanting to choose him.