Stuck in my Head
I got my song today! It’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. I’m lucky I got a good one. I’ll hear it for the rest of my life.
I’ve known how this works since I was ten. I get a song that only I can hear until one day I meet someone else who hears the same song. That person is my soulmate. There have been some unlikely matches, but it has never been wrong.
I’ve started humming it, hoping that my soulmate will hear it. There has been no luck yet. I am desperate to find my mate, but it appears that she is nowhere in my hometown. I’ve never known it to be so difficult. I continue humming it, hoping.
I have aged, but still no one with my song. I go to college and hope to find someone there. It does not happen. I continue humming.
I have finished college and head off to the big city to work. Surely there I will find my soulmate. It was not meant to be.
I have never heard of it taking someone so long to find their soulmate. My parents found each other within a week. I will wait a little while longer.
I am forty and still no soulmate. I think there may be something wrong with me. I start relationships knowing they won’t last. They’re not my soulmate. You can’t expect a relationship to last when it’s not with your soulmate.
At sixty I retire and move back home. One day, in church, I hear a blessed sound. It was my song! I had grown to feel that there was no one for me, so I didn’t believe what I was hearing at first. It was too hard to believe.
I listened day after day, hoping to hear my song again. Months went by, and I began to think I had imagined it. One evening as I was eating, I heard that blessed sound again. I looked around the restaurant and spotted the lady humming my song.
She was walking with another man, but that couldn’t stop me. She was my soulmate.
I walked past her, humming our song. She looked up with wide eyes. Then, she went back to reading the menu.
After being seated and ordering, I walked by her table again, humming all the while.
As the bathroom door closed behind me, I came face-to-face with my soulmate and her flaming eyes.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I heard you humming our song and wanted to make sure you knew we had finally found each other.”
She explained that I was about five years late.
“Max and I had both given up finding our soulmates. It had been so long. We thought that they may not exist or may even be dead.”
“But now I’m here. We can be together now!”
“We cannot. Max may not be my soulmate, but we are in love all the same. We have two children and a comfortable life. I will not give that up, even for my soulmate.”
Incredulous, I asked where that left me.
“I’m very sorry, but I hope you can find what I have. Don’t get hung up on the idea of a soulmate. Find someone who is a good friend and who you can grow old with. Forget you ever heard me humming that song.”
I paid and left the restaurant without ever touching my food. I was profoundly sad, but I was thinking about what she said. Tonight I would cry. Tomorrow I would begin looking for a good friend that hadn’t found their soulmate either.