On soulmates & the ones we wanted to be 'the one' (2024)

Now and then, I still check your page—and i’m still (as I always was) so proud of you. It’s late on a Thursday night and the conversation is ‘soulmates.’ Where is mine, where is his, where is yours?

The rain pours onto the balcony and the jazz drifts inside. here, in Viejo San Juan, it’s all citrine light and melancholia blues this summer night. Ford’s apartment makes me think of you, everything picked to adorn and quietly loved in—the unicorn collection, the plants, the many art pieces climbing the wall. Diana Ross looks over us as we discuss love and destiny and hope.

Where we disagree is on love at first sight. because, Ford thinks chemistry means something while I think chemistry is a mouse-and-cat game fraught with danger. I think soulmates can be found and sometimes we don’t recognize our soulmates right away but then one day, it clicks, and we’ve made it home.

I think that’s what is so exciting about love:

my person could be the neighbor I pass by now and then, or the friend I’ve known since we were kids or, or, it could be the complete stranger whose in their bed on a saturday night at 7PM with no plans but to read Victoria Chang and listen to gia margaret’s ‘romantic piano’ over the speaker. I imagine it like that— the camera’s shot split between two mirrored frames: there they are and there I am, doing the same act, preparing the same altar, but in two different places, in two different spaces of our respective lives—peddling forward until our timelines merge,

where it all clicks and we’ve made it home.

Ford theorizes that the people we meet until ‘the one’ spark a process of rememberance. I can agree with this. In others we begin to remember who our person is and the puzzle pieces begin to reveal themselves—the pieces you maybe didn’t know you were looking for. And of course, because the conversation is ‘soulmates’ the category is love and when I speak of love, I always speak of you.

I owe a great deal to you; had I not know your love, I would think it is a damning fate to love a man. But I did and so I don’t.

I speak of you and then I become a kid again, the same chiona you knew. I share about you to Ford and the couch I sit upon begins to sink and the citrine light becomes a bit dimmer and my sadness becomes a bit brighter—the sadness shouldn’t feel fresh but it does.

I never gave myself the time or space to grieve us because I didn’t want to feel the loss (I am also indignant towards the idea of feeling grief where there is no physical death) and it was a great loss.

I still remember when we met and you felt like home as did your apartment. The plush carpet beneath my feet, how we could see the san francisco fog rumble on, how your studio became the lighthouse at the end of my long walks and your music became the ocean I love.

We drove in the kia to grab burgers and you chose the in-and-out in daily city because you wanted to buy us time to talk more. and it was easy with you and I didn’t feel nervous, I felt excitement in your presence and very much so like myself— and that alone was enough.

[A photo from my very first walk to your apartment]

we talked about the new black panthers movie and for our next date we went to the frida kahlo exhibit. there, we critiqued the copywriters work (the fact that they wrote of kahlo’s life through the triangulation of the men in her life) and that same night, I wrote you an essay critiquing your favorite movie.

Loving you was infinitely easy and I’m sure there is a timeline where I still do, in that same way.

It makes me sad that I hurt you, although i’m sure it doesn’t matter now because now you’re on your right path—you’re free to meet your soulmate. still, it makes me sad that I didn’t speak clearly about what I wanted when I knew what I wanted.

[The SF room after we’d packed it all up]

I let you down and I’m deeply ashamed of this.

I began to sense that you wouldn’t be the one when I saw Rachel and her husband marry. They looked at each other and their auras became bright as the sun. That fall day in san francisco, they exchanged their vows in the courthouse and I cried.i then buried that ‘sense’ because I wanted you to be the one.

When it came down to it, I knew I needed someone sillier which may seem a trivial trait but it mattered and it matters. and, I knew you needed someone whose humor knew yours— and I wanted someone who would chat with me late into the night and I’m sure you would do well with someone brilliantly talented in the arts like yourself.

You always said I was the best writer that you knew but you are the better writer.

We loved each other and (this is not a ‘but’) we had many differences which indicated that we weren’t meant to be forever.

In the living room, beside the unicorns, I rehash bits of this history to Ford. he says I did you a favor by not stringing us along “one day” further but still I know that this can be right while it is also true that, I did you wrong— by leaving so abruptly and moving on so quickly.

you deserved less pain on behalf of my own childish growing pains.

now, I remember how we said goodbye before I left for the island. Maybe you didn’t know and I didn’t know, but I think we knew, that this exchange marked an end.

I cried as I hugged you goodbye and you reassured me, “it’s only for three weeks” but then, I never returned home.

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