What each of them have in common is you get to choose. Despite destiny, despite the universe, despite it all you still get to choose. It will always be your choice. Not just with soulmates, but how you live your life. How you deal with pain. Whether...
IF YOU WERE being quite honest, you were never one to talk about your feelings. Growing up, vulnerability was a foreign concept to you. Just as foreign as you, a black (colored) girl living in Japan. After your father died, a part of you died with him, and you never truly recovered from it. Your life felt like it was slowly falling apart, slowly pushing you into a box and eventually, into a little bottle where your feelings resided.
Opening up has always been the hardest thing for you to do. Truthfully, when you were much younger, you use to be as open as a book. But after your father passed, that book was hidden at the top of a tallest shelf in a large library. And when your mother attempted to put you in therapy to deal with your grief, anxiety and overall mental health; your therapist made it so much worse. That book was locked.
Even now, as an adult, you still struggled to be vulnerable and communicate. That's why you adored Saiki, he was so patient with you, more than most. You also loved painting because it was a way to express yourself beyond words, you could paint what your mouth couldn't verbalize. It was freeing and something you grew passionate about. So, you honed that passion and decided to make a life out of it.
Teruhashi and you were never truly friends, although, she once liked to believe you were. You never truly saw her as someone you could confide in or depend on, and sometimes, even be around. You never saw her as any of the important qualities a friendship should have. Therefore, you never saw her a friend. An acquaintance? Yes. But a friend? Not so much. At least, in the beginning.
To you, Teruhashi was more of a crazed girl with a superiority complex and an ego larger than Mount Everest. A girl who believed she was better than everyone else and deserved all the attention, not saving any for anyone else. A girl who viewed you as a prop for her image until she fell for you.
Sincerely, you only started to like Teruhashi when she had realized her feelings for you. It was then that she cared more about your feelings instead of a prop for her image, and viewed you as a human being. She would try to get close to you, learn more about you, and would slightly set her ego to the side to understand you.
All of these reasons are why you veryslowly but surely found yourself caring about the prideful girl. And eventually, you viewed her as one of your friends. Not one of the closest, more of a mere couple feet away from acquaintance, she still had a ways. But it was a start.
For Teruhashi, it didn't click how obnoxious and egotistical her character and personality was until you revealed yours and Saiki's relationship. After the reveal, she had forced herself to come to terms that the two people she had fallen for, loved each other.
