My mother called me about a week ago. I could hear her rinsing out a stainless steel pot from the other side. The way the water sounded in the basin reminded me of rice raining onto the ground. It made me think of my sister’s upcoming wedding, at least until she shut off the water and said, “Your father and I have separated.”
I once believed in soul mates. It’s an easy thing to believe in. People indoctrinate you into it. All the love stories in movies and television make you hold out hope that the one perfect guy or girl is out there for waiting for you. Then the older you get the more you start to understand there’s no such thing as soul mates. Soon enough another five years slip by and you get older and it’s not the impossibility that scares you. What really terrifies you is the chance it might be real. It keeps me up some nights. If the whole soul mate thing is real, what if we only get one person to be our true, exact soul mate? Just one person in so many billions. How can we find that person?
Now sure, some people will live on to find each other, and that’s great. But when I did believe in soul mates, I couldn’t buy the idea that some people never meet their soul mate due to distance, or time or other restrictions, because, well, if someone was truly your soul mate, you’d find each other. That’s how it works. You get one chance to meet them. But then, what if my soul mate passed away as a boy? What if he’s already gone?
That’s the thing about the cosmos — about everything, really. We’re ruled by symmetry. Balance. With my sister, it was easy for her to find her one true love. So naturally, with me, it has to be hard.
My sister and I talked about our parents’ divorce yesterday. We met up at the beach — she even brought her fiancé, Eric. The swell was the biggest I can remember in recent years. I’d never seen waves so tall. And one dark cloud hovered flatly over the horizon, perfect as a credit card’s magnetic strip.
About a half-mile down the beach and my sister finally brings it up. “I wonder what finally split them up. We should talk to them, make sure they’re OK.”
“Mom didn’t seem upset. I think once you hit a certain age you accept the fact that anything can happen. Better to just expect pain. Let’s face it. It’s hard to keep things going, especially after we moved out and they retired. Too much time to evaluate what they had.”
“Do you think they stayed together for us? Do you think they wanted to end it years ago?”
I didn’t know how to answer.
Eric called to us. “Someone’s having fun!” He used a stick to pull out a pair of pink, frilly panties from the tide. Then he touched them and yelped.
That’s when my sister and I saw them. Large jellyfish in the shapes of black mushroom clouds, draped with pink ruffles. I’d never seen so many. They were being pushed into shore by the current. We watched as they stretched into the apex of a wave and were smashed apart as the wave broke.
There was nothing they could do to struggle against it. They were serene amongst the waves. They seemed unfazed by being torn apart in the shallows. When the next wave rises, I see our reflections in its face. There’s someone I’ve never seen before standing next to me. I know if I turn to him he won’t be there. He waves at me as the wave crashes. I find myself waving back.
-Mason Schoen is a creative writing graduate student.
