we are inevitable | jakehoon

seven.

Being tired and being sleepy are two vastly different things, and Jake realises this for the first time as he passes the second hour without any semblance of sleep managing to reach him. He's sure he must be tired, he's been awake for almost eighteen hours now, but with the speeds at which things are running through his mind, he supposes he shouldn't expect proper rest anytime soon.

He wonders how Sunghoon is doing, up in his bedroom in his house two streets away, his bed facing the exact same direction as Jake's, lying face-up below the pale-translucent bauble that nine years ago would have needed both his hands to carry but now would barely need one, with two loose ends of gold nylon string hanging limp, the clumsy single-knot loops re-tied and re-tied over the years. He wonders if it hurts Sunghoon to look at it, to lie awake looking at something so far away that he, after tonight, knows will never be his to have.

He thinks of how superficial, how fake, how insipid, how asinine it is, that that clear plastic ball with its two golden strings, from that class nine years ago, could have given them so much hope for everything that could have been. He wonders if, if they'd just picked different partners for their soulmate star project that day, how much less they'd both have to hurt tonight.

Jake tries to imagine it. The teacher telling the class to stay with their seat partners, him sharing his star with the girl with pigtails who sat next to him for two terms, a girl whose name he couldn't even remember, them conversing awkwardly afterwards about who would keep the star because neither of them meant enough to each other for any sentimentality to be attached to it, Jake eventually agreeing to take it home because he didn't like disagreeing with people, only to leave it in the back of a drawer to gather dust as the years went by, eventually pulling it out during one of his spring cleaning days years, years later only to smile at the distant memory.

Maybe then he'd have been able to look upon that plastic ball as the crystallised embodiment of all his futile nine-year-old hopes and dreams.

Maybe then that star, that stupid ball with the stupid glow-in-the-dark element inside of it, wouldn't make his heart feel like it would split open from the inside every time he tried to envision it.

No, because the fact was that every single time he'd gone to Sunghoon's house they'd sat cross-legged on his bed and swung their hands back and forth to watch the loops on their left pinkies pull the bauble around where it hung suspended over the younger boy's bed, and all they'd ever expected from the 31st of December in 2021 was for fate to make that star a real one.

Instead, destiny had given them possibly the biggest and grandest fuck you ever to exist. He laughs with some measure of bitterness as he acknowledges that it must be an achievement to be this hated by the known universe.

Some part of Jake wants to curse at his third-grade science teacher for all the part he had to contribute in everything that had happened, what was his name? Mr Jung? As much as the logical side of his brain tells him that it's no one's fault other than their own, the other half of him screams into the void for someone, anyone else to take the blame.

Pointing fingers at other people is always easier than blaming yourself, and Jake has never felt it more starkly than he does now, but he puts everything aside for a moment just to think about everything Sunghoon must be feeling. Because, as horrible as it is to think about it in this way, regardless of devastating it is to have it thrown in your face that the only person you've ever loved was never meant to be yours, at the end of the day Jake still has someone out there who's destined to love him for the rest of his life. Sunghoon doesn't.

Unassigned people are rare, but they exist. Studies show about 2 in 10 million or so people are left without a soulmate when they turn eighteen. More often than not, so as not to disrupt the regularity of soulmate connections amongst the rest of the world, unassigned people will find each other, their other half in the 10 million. If they choose to have children, the condition is not hereditary and will almost definitely not be carried on. It's statistically the slightest bit too unlikely for three people in the same family to lose the universal lottery that 99.9999998% of people will win in their lifetime.