Moss and Mint

I used to believe in a soul mate.
Singular.
But it is and it isn't.

For a while, a short, ill-advised, never going back there again, while, I indulged in relationships that were temporary, that you could extrapolate yourself from and then you would never have to look back and they would disappear.
Except they wouldn't.
I found him in the most unusual of places in the aftermath, and it was like putting on clothes you wore camping, but there were still splinters poking at you from splitting wood.
He ruined Costco, I think we were happiest there, and motorcycles. Eggs.
Someone very dear to me recently told me that I had to allow myself to deserve nice things, nice people. I found him in my denial of that statement.
There is no extrapolation.
But even when he is cropping up at the most inopportune moments, he is not a soul mate, but that is not the point. The point is, I thought he didn't have to be. Until I didn't think that anymore.
When I started seeing him, really seeing who he was, in the sharpest parts of him, I never thought that he was.. like that? Like me? I never saw a soul mate.
Until I did, and I thought it was supposed to be forever.
Clearly, it wasn't, and clearly, like me, my soul makes mistakes.
I used to believe in a soul mate, singular.
The first boy was a singular. And it was that warm comfortable feeling that you get when you wake up from dreamless sleep in your childhood bed. It was that complete security in knowing exactly where you are and who is there with you. He felt like Saturday mornings when I was a kid. Singular.
I suppose when you sacrifice that, that singularity, there's a deep mourning for something you may never recover. And again, you think you can forget, but you don't. And you know you won't.
He ruined orange juice for me.
 Once, I read something, somewhere (and it would be useful to remember where, because I think it so often, like a mantra, but I can't), that there is a soul mate for each of us in this world. There is our other half, our twinned soul, and they are waiting to be united with us. But these twin souls could be anyone. If there is a girl who lives in Montana her whole life, the chances of her twin soul being the heterosexual boy she marries are very slim. Slim, indeed. The chances of that twin soul being a boy are only fifty fifty. And perhaps her twin soul isn't attracted to her sexually, or perhaps they have different values, or interests. Perhaps her twin soul is a girl, a sister, a mother. Perhaps they never speak the same language or meet or anything. You see, these twin souls are matched with the barest inklings of ourselves. They are twinned at the barest bones, stripped of priorities, experience, and knowledge. We know when we meet them not because of our immediate sexual attraction, the brilliant conversation, but because of the feeling of our souls being made whole, coming home.
The more I think and reflect on this, I realize that my soul mates were not found in the last two years. I know this. I also know that my soul is not some mere half to a fated whole. If my soul is fractured, or shaped, it's spherical and waiting for those like souls to cup it gently and be made malleable in their grasp. The concept of soul mate is pluralistic. My soul fits yours, and maybe it grinds against it, or snuggles inside it, or touches on the barest edge, but it fits.
It is and it isn't.
I'm very grateful.