This post is not about Liau Moalosi. A leap year is a year containing a single additional day in order to keep the calendar year synchronized with the seasonal year. They occur once every four years, a rarity, you could say. The same could be said for soulmates. Maybe you meet someone in a coffee shop or on the street corner, even in an embarrassing stunt at The Market theatre in which you spit an entire page of unrehearsed poetry on stage to an audience who cringe at your lacklustre perfomance. Somehow you walk back to your chair, and turn around to find someone beautiful staring at you like an observer in an art museum (because yes, let’s face it, you do quite resemble a Jackson Pollock painting by this point, you ). Maybe you strike up a conversation about your fascination of Ben Okris mastery of language with a complete stranger on public transportation and end up falling in love with them weeks later. Everyone defines their own soulmate in different ways. Most of us have dictionary pages disguised as love notes tucked into the corners of our ribcages like napkins, pages where soulmate is spelled out just the way we want, and sometimes, coincidence or not, we meet someone who fits our exact definition. And when we do, we fall harder than a rainstorm held hostage after the clouds finally let it escape. I’m talking the kind of love that bloodies you with how good it feels, the kind of love that wraps its hands around your throat and then apologizes for leaving palm-shaped bruises, love like a natural disaster that never quite slows down no matter how many sandbags you pack against its heaving, leaking walls. And you think this is it. And you think this is everything. And you think, as all people do when they’ve found their soulmate, that this person is “the one.” That there can’t possibly be anyone else for you. Because just like leap years, this soulmate came along when you least expected it. You’d spent the last four years of your life waiting for this person and they finally came around. Your heart is forcing your brain to be in denial. And when you deny that this person might not be your one and only soulmate for the rest of your life, you also deny the possibility that eventually they might leave. And some of them do. They leave after falling out of love, they leave still in love but with the knowledge that staying would clip their wings, they leave after drunken fights and horrible mistakes and failed anniversaries and because they just need a fresh start and sometimes, they leave because they’ve found another soulmate who, and this will sound harsh, replaces you. But hold on to that very same thought after your soulmate leaves, when you’re drunk on boxed wine and despair, sobbing into your glass of Oros, when you can’t go to work, school or bootycall because your bed reminds you too much of the soft cocoon their arms used to form around you in sleep. If there is one good thing you can take from this, let it be that. That for each person in this world, there exists more than one soulmate. The soulmate you thought was your only soulmate has now moved on to their second soulmate. Maybe that second soulmate was their backup. Maybe your first soulmate was just practice. Maybe the whole time you were with them you were never quite home, but will be soon. It’s like the color wheel- some colors are complementary, and are positioned directly opposite to one another on the wheel. They balance one another out. This is your first soulmate. And other colors are analogous- they sit directly next to each other on the wheel. This is your second soulmate, who hides in the background, so close to you you’d never think twice about them, or even notice they were there, because when you break up with your first soulmate, you’re not looking at the minute details. You’re looking at the big picture, and all you can see in it is this gaping future without the one person you assumed you’d be with forever. You don’t even notice your second soulmate until it’s almost- but not quite- too late. So this is what you do: you wait. You wait patiently and you wait quietly, and you gradually slough off your sorrow like snakeskin and you learn how to go on dates again without carrying all the bitterness into your next and stop looking for your first soulmate’s smile in every spoon’s reflection; you stop listening for their laugh in the sound of the raindrops falling on your roof. You remember the concept of the leap year, and how it only comes around once every four years, and that it’s rare- but when it does come, it brings an entire extra day with it. A day on which you can do anything and everything you set your heart to. You remember that soulmates are rare too, but when they arrive from the background, almost as if out of nowhere, you can do anything and everything with them. They keep your life synchronized with the seasons. They balance the hurt from the first relationship with the joy of the second. And this is how the wound heals.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 18:41:44 +0000
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