2024 Story Collection

The Hero Named Ghost and His Soulmate

She had been writing for hours now. It was a language she could find nothing of online. Yet, she knew it by heart. It was written in lines with geometric shapes that wrapped around the lines. It wasn't something that could be directly translated. Yet she wrote it easily.

Who are you? She couldn't help but wonder what type of man her soulmate was. Was he even human? She had to ask herself. This language was foreign to this world, was he from the future or a long lost past? A parallel universe?

She leaned back in her chair. The paintings scattered around her apartment held all the questions left unanswered by her soulmate.

She was an artist by trade. She did freelance artwork as her job. Anything from album and book covers to random memes people submitted but her dream was to display her work in the biggest galleries in the world.

After a while of nothing but no's, she had finally gotten interest in her work after a few years of trying to get it noticed. It was a single wall at a small popup gallery above a cafe a few streets down from where she lived. It wasn't much, but it excited her none the less. It was the first chance she'd have to display her art.

Most thought of her work as abstract, but the colorful geometric paintings were the language of her soulmate. She was hoping that one day, by chance or by fate, he'd stumble upon her work and realize she was his soulmate. While she knew it was unlikely, she couldn't help but be hopeful.

Her soulmate. She had been dreaming a lot lately when she passed out after sunrise. The dreams filled with hope. But she'd had nightmares too. Ones filled with her choking on petals until she couldn't breath. Rejection.

Unconsciously she rubbed her arm. She looks down at her forearm where the sunflower tattoo sits. It was her soulmate mark given to her by fate. Her soulmate had a matching one.

Everyone had a soulmate and on the soulmates wrist's was a matching flower tattoo. Fate was kind to people, they gave people the knowledge of their soulmate's first language. Some people knew French or Russian but lived in Mexico. Some only spoke one language if their soulmate also spoke it.

The only problem was that some never meet their soulmate. Only 5% of the population finds their soulmate before the age of 20. !2% more through the ages of 20-30. 16% more from 30-40%. Most of the rest meet their soulmate by the age of 80. But 2-3% never find their soulmates.

So with those odds, most date and marry a person they love rather than waiting. Like her parents had. But there's a problem with marrying a non-soulmate.

If you do find a soulmate, you have to accept them or reject them. If you reject them you will both die by the flower on their body. The Hanahaki disease, where flowers grow in ones lungs until eventually they suffocate them. The one rejected will die within months, but the reject-or could live as long as 50 years before the disease finally takes them or like her uncle, it could take them in one day. It was unpredictable.

Her father met his soulmate when Lucy was 10 and accepted her, divorcing her mother. Lucy had gone back and forth every week between their houses. She wished she could've hated her father and his soulmate but the truth was that they were great together and Jessica, his soulmate, was one of the most kind, understanding and genuine people she'd ever met.

Her mother however did hate them and would constantly ask Lucy for any information she could use against them. Lucy began to spend more time with her father because it was hard to be around her heartbroken mother.

Then one day, her mother found her soulmate, Lucy was almost 15 then, when she'd gotten the call fromt the hospital. Her mother had been rejected and immediately went into cardiac arrest. Then did some tests and found that her lungs were already filled with flowers. Lucy made it the hospital right as her mother look her last breaths. All she got to say was "I love you."

She had isolated herself after that, she had hidden herself away and kept to herself. The once cheerful, extroverted child, now a shell of her former self. She'd hated soulmates after that. She avoided her father and Jessica because they were a bad reminder. The day graduated, she found a place and moved out, a few days later on her 18th birthday, she'd looked down to see a sunflower blooming on her wrist. The next 24 hours was her, in a manic daze writing out all her thoughts in the new language she'd acquired. She'd always thought her soulmate would speak the same language, turns out she was just a late bloomer.

When she came back to her senses and looked around her apartment that was covered in papers written in this no so foreign language, she smiled. She had tried to fight it-the feeling of joy, happiness that came over her every time she interacted with the language or looked at her tattoo, but couldn't. All the sudden, she couldn't wait to meet her soulmate.

She had understood then, the pull her father must have felt. The complete heartbreak and rejection that killed her mother. She understood that this was something stronger than love, it was destiny.

Over the next few months, she began to come back out of her shell and went to dinner every Sunday at her fathers house, on the way she would visit her mothers grave to give her flowers.

Also around that time, she began to paint. Writing in her soulmates language helped her clear her mind and brighten her day, so she wrote, painted, sketched and drew. Overtime, she got quite good.

To be continued...

February 28, 2024