the red string theory

Whatever is meant for you will cross oceans, winds, and mountains to find you. If it is truly yours, it will survive distance and doubt. It will revolt against every hurdle to arrive at your doorstep, because it was already yours to begin with.

That is the comforting part of the red string theory.

The terrifying and alienating part is that what is not meant for you will teach you this just as relentlessly.

You will learn in a thousand ways that it only sat briefly on your fingertips. You will spend nights trying to force broken glass back together, trying to convince yourself that love alone can make something stay. You will fight for him and for the version of yourself that existed beside him. But some things resist being held.

The broken glasses refuse to piece themselves back together.

And the more you bleed, the more it reminds you that it was never and will never be yours.

Life occurs by happenstance, and we ought to make peace with that. A static moment redefines your entire life. A person crashes into your soul with such force that your nervous system is neither abrupt nor still. You begin mistaking coincidence for fate. Their arrival feels too consuming to be circumstantial.

You tell yourself this must mean something. This must be the one my soul has been waiting for.

But not every collision is painless or painful. Some are simply impact.

I think that is what both soothes and unsettles me about the red string theory. The reality that there are things already written for us long before we arrive at them. That somewhere, quietly and invisibly, life had already decided what stays and what leaves.

And a long stretch cannot rewrite it.

There are moments when I want desperately to trust in it. I want to trust that what is mine will come to me, certainly. I want to believe that I have something other than sadness written for me. That all this waiting is not meaningless.

But the more I wait, the more I feel the last thread of hope giving out from my soul. And waiting is cruel. It is hallowing and unbearable. It convinces you that every almost is a promise of something fulfilling.

But I am tired of all the almosts in my life.

I am almost grateful, but never truly fulfilled. I almost reach the life I want before it disappears again.

And if the red string finds us wherever we are, does it inevitably lead us toward inherited things?

A road of loveless marriages, exhausted mothers and all the unmovable wounds that begin to feel indistinguishable from destiny itself.

I am afraid of the string finding me no matter where I run.

That I could be standing alone on a street in Paris, thousands of miles away from everything familiar, and still wake in the middle of the night carrying the same ache passed down to me by women before me

The scariest thing about life is its uncertainty in ways we cannot negotiate with. You can pray for certain endings. You can beg against others. You can try to outgrow fate, outrun it, reason with it.

But some things arrive no matter what.

And some things leave the same way.