If you’ve found your soulmate, you probably can’t pinpoint the exact moment you pledged your heart to them.
Sometimes all it takes is one date, and before you know it, you feel your heart slowly catching hold, like a fish latching on to a small, glinting hook, barely visible in the wide, glimmering sea.
Sometimes all it takes is them tucking your hair behind your ear in a way that would annoy you if anyone else did it. You’re surprised by how soft their hands are and how gentle their touch is. And all of a sudden, you know your heart will never be free again, but for once you’re not scared because you’re willing to let yourself fall, inevitably, into love.
Finding your soulmate means undressing slowly, forgetting to breathe, the shiver of a touch, electric on the skin, leaving behind goosebumps. It means that in one fleeting moment, you glimpse, just for a second, the shimmering heart of another. You wrap yourself in each other’s arms, not wanting to let go, believing that this will never end.
Finding your soulmate means days and weeks and months full of unstoppable smiles, cheeks hurting, stomach aching from the boundless laughter that fills the rooms of your rental, with its peeling wallpaper. But the wallpaper melts into the vacuum of your memories until only the love remains—hearts that still remember to love endlessly and without expectation.
Finding your soulmate means one day recognizing that it’s not always going to be easy and that you’re going to have to work hard for your love. It means hot, sticky days where tempers rise and tears come too easily, where your head aches and you desperately want to throw something, but instead you hurl hateful words that can’t be taken back. With your soulmate comes a lifetime of sacrifice, of sweeping things under the rug until they pile up endlessly, rising up like a nightmarish horde of monsters.
You fight and make up until neither of you remembers what you’re fighting about, so you wrap each other in infinite arms and make promises you both won’t keep, but it doesn’t matter, because you are soulmates.
When you find your soulmate, you go through all the phases together. You go through swimming phases, guitar phases, brewing-your-own-beer phases, and vegan phases. You do it together and apart, growing and changing, but your paths still remain forged together like a multi-twine string that never breaks. And even though that string bends and twists and ties into knots and hangs by a thread sometimes, it always gets woven back together again.
Finding your soulmate means hating your powerless, vulnerable heart for loving, but loving it all the same, because that same heart led you to this love, and you wouldn’t give that up for anything. Because love has never felt like this before, and it never will again.
Finding your soulmate is all of this, always, again and again.
