The Bittersweet String of Acceptance

The Bittersweet String to Acceptance

I've never believed in the Red String of Fate. All throughout my years of living, I've heard people talking about the ridiculous legend of the Red String that fated people to each other. Though I could never tell if what I hated was truly the idea of soulmates or my despisement of Fate. After all, it was Fate that had brought on such misfortune to my childhood. It was the Fate that I had so cursed, out of my sadness and pain.

My thoughts of my past are shattered when my best friend, Ammerie, shouted out, "Bodhi!". I smirked in amusement at her.

"You know you don't have to yell since you're literally less than two feet from me right? You done saying bye to your 'soulmate'?" Using finger quotations as I said 'soulmate'.

She only rolled her eyes in response and remarked an annoyed, "Yeah."

We carried on walking with haste to her car, when she spoke, " What do you have against the Red String legend of soulmates?".

Sighing I responded, "You know why I don't favor that story, Ammerie. Don't you remember the last time you asked?".

She comically paled in color, putting a slight diminish on her usual tanned skin, as she started up her car and started to drive.

She responded with a weak, "Y-yeah, I remember," she shuddered a bit thinking back onto last time, " But why do you assume it was 'Fate' that did that to your past and not jus-," I cut her sentence off with a glare, she knew that I wasn't in the mood to retell what I've already told her.

We continued our drive in a delicate silence. It was clear that we were both suffocating in the thick tension in the air, I had to break this stifling atmosphere.

I said, "How're things going with her?" Ammerie started to beam, knowing what I meant and almost instantly forgetting the last conversation.

She responded with, "She's doing fine, we've been going through a slight rough patch but it's nothing that we haven't been through before." As she ended her sentence she giggled merrily.

We continued chatting happily as we reached our destination. 'An adult life isn't complete without having a fun time once in a while', Ammerie liked to say, even though we both were only in our last year of college, still struggling to make ends meet and always making me facepalm in my head when I hear it.

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The next day, I woke on a random couch to people passed out near me, head pounding and eyesight hazy. " I regret everything," I sputtered pathetically as my sight cleared. " Wait... What is this?".

My sight seemed to clear, but am I dreaming? What am I seeing? Everything seems normal, except, what's this bright string? Looking both to my left and right, all I can see out of the ordinary is this bright red string that is seemingly connected to everyone's ankles and to each other. I try to find a place in sight without it. It's everywhere. It is completely and utterly, everywhere. I must be losing my mind, I must have become utterly insane, I thought, bewildered. My earlier talking out loud seemed to wake someone up.

The stranger was somewhat near me and so I said, " Hey, do you see this?" pointing to an example of the red string with Stranger confused.

Stranger said, "...No..? Miss, are you okay? There's nothing there."

I quickly make an excuse to my strange, peculiar question. As I start sprinting to find Ammerie, I see everyone with that. One. Connected. Red string. My head still pounding, I sprint only faster. Finally, I find her but passed out on, a bookshelf. How on earth she got there, I don't think I'll ever know, but I do think at that moment, ' Wow...I'm friends with an idiot. Her girlfriend is going to kill her, and maybe me for not staying with her throughout the night.' Shaking my thoughts away, I wake Ammerie up and help drag her deadweight body off the bookshelf and call another friend to drive us back to the building.