Go Against Destiny ✓

destiny 09

For seven years, he had been attempting to defy this absurdity known as destiny. And for seven years, all he had felt about the outcomes was frustration.

The first time he had gotten himself a girlfriend, he was fifteen. Sensible and sweet, the young woman was everything a guy could have asked for.

A match made in heaven, their friends had dubbed them. His whole family had adored her. Her parents had been thrilled to know him. And he was too young, too naïve to think that he had found the one with whom he could spend the rest of his life.

During those years, the whole world had seemed to be on their side. Everyone had been convinced that nothing could ever break them apart.

Until the time their stars had decided to betray them. Until the day he had turned eighteen and begun seeing the strange threads around people's fingers.

From an old book of folklore, he had learned that they had a name. The red strings of fate. The threads that linked a person to their soul mate.

He had initially regarded the idea as a bullcrap, a tale as realistic as the unicorns or the golden pot at the end of the rainbow. He had kept being in denial, especially after he had discovered that he and his girlfriend were not bound to each other.

College had come, and they had to part ways, leaving each other with vows that things between them would never change.

But words were fragile.

Promises were always meant to be broken.

The flame had gradually waned.

And soon, it had expired.

"What happened? You used to be the perfect couple in high school," old acquaintances would sometimes ask.

'You don't need to know,' he'd wanted to snap. In the end, he could only offer a polite smile. "Things did. We both got so busy, and we just sort of drifted apart."

Deep down, the urge to blame everything on the red strings was always there. But allowing the reaction to breathe would be tantamount to acknowledging the validity of fate, and the last thing he needed to do was give it a space in his life and a chance for control.

His first heartbreak had kicked off a firmer resistance and made him more determined to have a significant other whom he had chosen for himself.

You can't dictate me, he had thought one night while glaring at the bright band around his little finger. He had sworn that, someday, he would be destroying this curse and fleeing from its shackles.

And so, he had set out to rebel.

He had found his next partner a year after the end of his first love. Another great woman whom he was perfectly compatible with. Another person whose thread was unattached to his.

And another supposedly beautiful relationship that had wound up being a failure.

He could have fought harder for their love then, if only he had not discovered that the woman's red string had been connected to her male best friend, if he had not witnessed with his own eyes the other man's capability of making her happier more than he could have ever done for her.

His second relationship had been a typical romantic cliché. Except he was not the male lead in the heroine's story. It was a friends-to-lovers trope, and he was just a plot device.

It had taken him a few more years before he'd realized that fate might have been being unfair to him, but he too had been acting selfish by getting into a relationship with people whom he knew were not bound to him, just for the sake of his own rebellion. Those women were all innocent and had just been unsuspectingly dragged into his issue.