How I Knew

chapter one - lennon

Everyone has a soulmate. Everyone can count on fate to meet their person.

At twenty-three, I'm beginning to think fate has failed me.

You are usually matched with your soulmate at the same age your parents were matched. According to studies, the probability of you being matched years before or later than they were is less than ten percent. It can deviate a year earlier or a year later, but no more than that. The system follows a pretty straight-lined timeline. It is a predetermined destiny influenced by your ancestors' history.

Your soulmate's parents met around the same year as your parents. It is one of the characteristics that bonds one person to the other.

The easiest way to explain the system is by comparing it to the East Asian belief of "the red thread of fate." The myth states there is an invisible red thread around the finger of those who are destined to meet as they ought to be true love. The system is the equivalent of the lunar matchmaker god, who is in charge of the romantic relationships.

Our familial history partly symbolizes the red thread since it is what creates the initial connection and determines our soulmate. Our changing eye color represents the other half of the red thread as it is what leads us to meet our destined lover. The two people connected by the red thread—or in this case the different eye colors—are soulmates regardless of the place, time, or circumstances. The moment you have met your fated lover and the feeling of love blossoms, your eyes go back to their natural color as you have fulfilled your destiny.

Without the connection of changing eyes, you are not only unable to find your person, but you are also incapable of understanding their heart and establishing an emotional connection.

The different colored eye disappears once you fulfill your destiny because at that point you no longer need the system to justify the relationship for you. In that moment, you are aware of why this is your person and why fate has brought you together.

It is why there is no belief that the system is ever wrong. If a pairing doesn't work, it's because of human error. Our desires—greed, selfishness, lust—interrupted or damaged the connection of true love.

My parents met each other at the age of nineteen. I'm three years past.

Every day I wake up with the hope of looking in the mirror and seeing something else apart from my amber eyes.

Today is another day I am disappointed by my own reflection.

Surprise.

I sigh, taking a moment to accept reality. Any other day, I might have sulked like I usually do every weekend. However, I'm supposed to be meeting my best friend Claudia to help her apartment hunt.

Claudia and I met our freshman year of high school. Meeting at such a pivotal moment of our youth is what I think has allowed us to continue to be friends years later. We have seen each other at our worst both physically and emotionally.

Unfortunately, we weren't one of those girls that graciously go through puberty by the age of fourteen. Instead of being hit by it like a truck, puberty would give us an ounce of progress every year until we were probably twenty. More so, me I think. There are times where I still wonder if maybe there's a little pending glow up.

I mean, this can't be it. Can it?

However, despite claiming the same puberty struggles as me, Claudia has always been slightly ahead. As society's standard of beauty with her blue eyes and blonde hair, she revels in the male attention she gets every time we go out.

Unlike me, Claudia isn't really in a rush to be matched. She enjoys the freedom of the unknown.

Claudia enjoys the game of chasing and ditching.