By: Melly
“Do you believe in soulmates?”
You asked me that once,
casually, the way you said most dangerous things —
like they weren’t loaded.
Like the question wasn’t a lit match
held too close to something dry.
“I do,”
I said.
Quickly. Stupidly.
Without the good sense to hesitate.
I believed — fiercely, foolishly —
that destiny could not be negotiated,
that the right person simply finds you
the way a name finds you in a crowd.
But you — you laughed.
Not in a cruel way.
Just with that low, teasing sound in your throat
that I was already learning to want.
You used words like compatibility, alignment, content —
clinical words, cold words,
words that belong in a job interview
and not in the mouth of someone
whose mouth I was already thinking about.
It made me angry.
And a little sad, if I’m honest —
that you held those notions,
that you had no idea what it felt like
to drown in your own emotions,
to burn from the inside out,
to love so hard you lose the thread
of what you were even living for before.
I didn’t know then
that you would be the one to prove me wrong.
That love would turn out to be so much more
than a question of where you belong.
You were taken.
So was I.
And still we let ourselves fall —
slowly at first, then all at once,
the way you don’t notice the current
until you’re already far from shore.
We told ourselves the comfortable lie:
just friends. just words. just this.
We should have known
we were doomed from the very first conversation
that ran two hours past where it should have ended.
Messages turned into calls.
Calls turned into the first thing I reached for
when I woke.
And before long I wanted nothing more
than to be in whatever room you were in,
to exist in your vicinity,
to be seen by you
the way I was starting to see myself.
Then one day I woke up
and my whole life felt like a coat
that no longer fit.
The man I had loved for years —
good man, honest man, my man —
felt suddenly like a room with no windows.
And when he called me wife
I smiled and felt myself disappear
a little more each time.
I’d never been a woman who looked back.
Never grieved the roads not taken,
never wondered who else I might have loved.
But you —
you made me count the cost of everything.
Every day with you I became more certain:
I could give it all up.
The life. The name. The careful, constructed thing.
All of it.
For the way you said my name
like it was something worth saying.
Fortunate or unfortunate —
it depends who you ask.
I got to know what it felt like
beneath your touch.
Your hands that already knew me
before they had any right to.
Your mouth — slow, certain, devastating —
like you were trying to memorize me
because you already knew
we were running out of time.
They don’t write songs about this kind of love.
The kind with no clean ending, no villain, no excuse.
The kind that just — happens.
Like weather. Like gravity.
Like a question asked too casually
by someone who had no idea what they were starting.
And then came the day
we always knew was coming
and refused to look at directly —
the way you don’t look at the sun.
The day you stood in front of me
with your coat on,
already leaving,
already gone.
You were not angry.
That was the worst part.
You were just — broken.
Quietly, thoroughly,
the way good men break
when they finally understand
they are not going to be chosen.
And you asked me —
voice low, half a question,
half a thing you already knew the answer to —
“Do you believe in soulmates?”
The same question.
The same words.
A different room. A different kind of dark.
A completely different woman standing in it.
I thought of who I used to be —
the one who answered so quickly,
so stupidly, without hesitation.
The one who believed in destiny
the way you believe in something
before life gets its hands on you.
I thought of what we were.
What we could not be.
How love had turned out to be
a room with your name on the door
and no key.
“No,”
I said.
And I meant it.
And it cost me everything to mean it.
You looked at me for a long time.
The way you always looked at me —
like I was something worth memorizing.
Like even now, even here,
I was still it for you.
And then, so quietly
I almost didn’t hear it:
“I do,”
you said.
“Because you’re mine.”
Even as you walked out the door.
You came in arguing against destiny.
You left believing in it.
I came in believing.
I left holding the door open for you to go.
Somewhere in between,
without either of us noticing,
we had traded places.
And the cruelest part —
the part I will carry longest —
is that your last words to me
were the truest thing
anyone has ever said.
And I let you walk away with them,
a piece of my soul forever entwined with yours.
“I do too,”
I whispered to the closed door.
