There’s this theory that has been turning over in my mind lately; the way you might rotate a smooth stone between your fingers, trying to feel for its hidden fractures.
It goes like this: ‘us’ was never a mere accident.
Not the big things, not the love or the loss. But also not the small things.
Not the missed turn that made you thirteen minutes late. Not the cancelled train that made you late. Not the book someone left on a park bench you gravitated to and picked up, years before you were destined to meet her who would eventually quote the same book back to you.
What if every ‘almost’ was actually a preparation. Like a footnote you skip over the first time, only to return to it later and realize it held the whole thesis. Or the trajectory of two comets that will cross paths once, then never again, but that one crossing rewrites the sky.
What if there was an invisible string, tying you to someone you hadn’t met yet, pulling you both through the same streets, the same seasons, the same quiet griefs; always just out of sync, until one day, the universe finally learned our rhythm.
_____
I met you at a funeral of all places.
Not of someone we loved. Someone we barely knew really. A friend of a friend. The kind of peripheral loss that still demands you to show up, still asks you to stand in line and murmur words that feel borrowed.
I almost didn’t go. Spilled coffee on my only black blouse and spent a good ten minutes trying to scrub it out before giving up.
You were standing by the living room window when I walked in. Hands in your pockets, watching rain trace slow paths down the glass. You weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. In fact, you were lost somewhere inside your own head, and I was just the blur at the edge of it.
But something in my chest cracked open like a window I didn’t know had been sealed shut.
Later, you would tell me you felt it too. That quiet thunder in your ribs. That voice, small and certain, whispered, “There you are.”
We didn’t speak that day. I stood three rows behind you during the service. Left without saying a word. Then spent the next three weeks convincing myself I’d imagined it somewhere in the midst of yearning for a loss that was not mine.
________
Six months later I found myself at a dingy bar in a part of town I never went to, all in the name of “exploration purposes.” I was nursing a drink I didn’t want when a single voice cut through all the noise; not louder than the others, just clearer, like it was speaking directly to the part of me that had been yearning.
“Can I get you another one of those?”
I turned around to face the voice. And there you were.
“You,” I said.
You blinked and smiled, highlighting your cheeky charm, the kind that had probably gotten you out of trouble more times than you deserved. “Do I know you?”
“No,” I replied. And then: “Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.”
You chuckled at that. A small sound, barely more than an exhale, but it landed somewhere inside me and stayed.
“I was at that funeral,” I blurted. “Months ago. You were standing by the window.”
Your smile softened. “I looked for you after. Couldn’t find you.”
“I left.”
“I know.”
We stayed until the bar closed. We talked about everything and nothing and everything in between. The cities we grew up in. Which were different, except we’d both spent our school breaks at the same town.
You walked me to my car. It was raining and neither of us had an umbrella.
“I feel like I know you,” you said. “Is that crazy?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been thinking about you for six months.”
You wrote your number on my palm with a pen from your jacket. I kept my hand in a tight fist the whole drive home, afraid the rain would wash it away.
_____
After that, the string kept revealing itself.
The summer before we met before the funeral, before anything; I drove six hours to the coast. Sat on a pier and watched the sunset, thinking about how small I was, how insignificant.
You were there. Not on the same pier. But on the beach below. You told me later you found a piece of sea glass that night; green, smooth, shaped like a heart. You kept it in your pocket for months. Lost it somewhere. Forgot about it.
Until I found it. Months after we started dating, I was cleaning out my glove compartment. And there, tucked into the corner, was a piece of sea glass. Green. Smooth. Shaped like a heart.
I didn’t remember putting it there. You didn’t remember losing it.
But there it was. Evidence that we’d been orbiting each other long before we ever collided.
______
The string was the songs we both saved, in different apartments, at different hours, both trying to find words for feelings we didn’t have names for yet.
The string as the nightmares we both had as children, falling from a great height, waking up right before impact.
Small things. Tiny threads that seemed meaningless on their own.
But woven together, they made a rope.
____
Back when we were still new enough that everything felt fragile, I asked you if you believed in fate.
You thought long and hard about it. Then you took my hand, the one with the crescent-shaped scare that matched yours, same palm, same story, and traced the line of my lifeline with your thumb.
“I don’t believe in fate,” you said finally. “Fate feels too heavy. Like some unknown force already wrote the ending before we had a say.”
“Then what do you believe in?”
You smiled. That slow, devastating smile that I would spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.
“I believe in the string.”
________
Sometimes I try to trace it backward. All the invisible architecture that built this moment. The hands that had to let go so we could hold each other’s, the places we almost were but weren’t, the versions of ourselves we had to outgrow before we could fit into the shape of us.
I don’t know its destiny. I don’t know if it’s luck.
But I know for certain that I felt it. That quiet tug on my heart strings. That stubborn thread pulling us through the noise and the near-misses and the years we spent not knowing each other’s names.
Tying you to me.
Tying me to you.
Always.
Written By: Ash
