oneshots » gmw

soulmate - rucas

oh god my first first-person gmw writing. please pray i survive this, especially considering it's for plutology's second oneshot contest. and since it doesn't really fit at the end, i'm going to go ahead and put the password here: riley's pluto

all the same, i hope you enjoy.

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What if I told you that every single person in existence had a countdown clock until the exact time they met their soulmate?

Well, don't be too shocked by the idea, that's what my society has programmed into them from the moment they're born. A small, digital clock on the underside of their wrist, where the skin is soft and violet veins pop out against the skin.

Although, thank god, it's not always visible. You know those digital watches that you always had when you were a kid? The kind that look kind of like a normal bracelet until you tap it and suddenly the time appears in red? Yeah, that's what our countdown is like, same font and everything. 

The time on everyone's wrist is different, except for you and your soulmate. Some only have to wait mere seconds after their born, some have to wait until they're old and grey. But, from what I've heard, no matter how long you have to wait, you're always happy after the fact. Satisfied from the moment you lock eyes until the end of time because you've just met the one person that will always love you and listen to you and care for you. Maybe that's why people were always confused by me, as to why I still had a timer on my wrist, but was somehow always happy.

I know I'm making this out to sound pretty good right now, but for some, it's considered a curse. Sometimes it's because their soulmate dies and they have to live out the rest of their lives knowing the one person meant for them is dead, which I can understand. But others, they think they should fall in love with whoever they want to, not when some stupid human bodily timer tells us to. Only, here's where I think they're wrong. Because the red numbers on our wrist aren't ticking until we meet our lover, it's until we meet our soulmate. Which, some people don't realize, is different entirely. A soulmate is a person ideally suited to another, which is not specific to lover at all. Hell, pardon my language, the person you meet when the time says one may be more like a sibling than anything!

Only, I was hoping for the former, lover aspect. Because, frankly, I was not in the market for any more siblings. That and I was really lacking in the romance department.

Luckily, rushing to my job at a small cafe close to my dorm, I didn't have to wait much longer. After twenty-one years of tapping my wrist insistently, waiting for the countdown to get to one already, dammit, pardon my language, I only had ten seconds left. And if this sounds casual in the slightest, it wasn't.

I'd spent over two hours that morning (a good ten times longer than normal) doing every thing I could possibly do to make myself look good. I'd picked out my best outfit and done my hair and makeup intricately, in hopes of not looking like an overworked, stressed out, creative writing major (which I was). And, don't get me wrong, for about three milliseconds that morning I thought about just staying home, trying to cheat the code. Just to see if my soulmate would come barging through the girls dorms to find me, but I decided against it. I'd waited too long for this for it not to happen naturally.

So I'd ended up running down the busy Massachusetts streets in my red leather skirt and a sleeveless rose-speckled blouse with my hair tied up in a complicated braid-bun thing I was sure I'd never to be able to do again, continuously tapping my wrist while uncomfortably shouldering my messenger bag, just so the countdown would never disappear. I couldn't bear to let it.

10

My breath caught in my throat then, just at the sight of it. Suddenly my mind was anywhere but work, not like it had ever been there in the first place, and I had begun to shake uncontrollably. Never in my life had I ever been so nervous for anything, but really, this would probably be one of the defining moments of my existence, the worry was warranted. Or that's what I told myself.