There are 8.5 billion people on planet Earth. It is, thus, astonishingly unlikely ever to find your true soulmate: that elusive other half, that person who makes you feel whole.
And within the infinitesimal fraction of people who have met their soulmate, I am even more fortunate. Mine became a permanent fixture in my life before I even turned 18.
Rajonna came into my life when I was 13 years old, but she did not reveal herself as my soulmate until we were 17, taking our “morning walks” through the halls of our high school. We discussed all subjects (with the same solemnness afforded to each) — our latest crushes, the new Maisie Peters album that had “changed our brain chemistry” and the crippling fear of disappointing our families with our college application results.
Over the course of three years, I’ve learned everything about her. She despises most fishy-tasting things. She speaks fluent Bengali. And as a result, the phrase “I love you” in Bengali, Ami tomake bhalobhasi, has become intimately associated with the memory of her smile when I learned how to say it and, without knowing its meaning, repeated it to her for the first time.
She is just as much a Swiftie as I am, perhaps more (and she’d want me to tell you that her favorite album is Speak Now). She loves crocheting so much that for a full year, she gave every one of her friends a crochet duck on their birthday — mine still sits on my bed back home in Texas, and I make sure to greet it with a loving squish each time I visit. She once managed to burn microwaveable mac and cheese. She is lactose intolerant, but will absolutely demolish an entire wheel of cheese if given the opportunity.
If I tell Rajonna that I just went to Trader Joe’s to buy their bourbon vanilla bean paste, she will show me the Trader Joe’s grocery bags sitting in the corner of her apartment from her trip there the day before. If she mentions a reel she saw about one of the drinks we want to make together, it will be the same one I saw a week ago. When I text her lyrics from a song that’s been tickling my brain particularly well one morning, she will send me the Spotify screenshot of her listening to the same song just a few minutes before my message.
And on the note of music, the 98% similarity in our music tastes, according to Spotify Blend, gives credence to my working theory about the two of us: fate performed some sort of corrupted “copy-paste” to create Rajonna and me. Only divine intervention, with a very chaotic sense of humor, would allow us to remain in such proximity to one another for seven years; anyone sane would fear the potential our friendship has to either help us take over the world or cause a life-threatening natural disaster. But distance has made no difference to us — we’ve reached a level of “soulmate” where, even from 1,345 miles away, at separate colleges, we live the same life.
She is the only person I know — outside of me, of course — who can read minds (maybe we can just read each other's minds, though; an MRI may be needed to confirm the true potential of our supernatural abilities). She knows exactly who I’m thinking of when I say, “You’ll never guess who I talked to today.” She knows to spam me more than our usual agreed-upon two texts and 200 reels when I haven’t responded in days. She knows that my silence in her presence is a sign of comfort, an unspoken understanding that I don’t have to fill the quiet with self-deprecating jokes or be vivacious and bubbly for her.
But what truly makes Rajonna my soulmate is not our infinite similarities or that she seems to have a Big-Brother-esque lens into the inner workings of my mind. It is the fact that I feel just at home with her as I do with myself, a feeling that hasn’t emerged fully with anyone else. No part of me is performing, no personality trait or quirk is hidden. I never bother trying to be more than what I am, because in our friendship, being ourselves has always been enough. She is the only person who has seen every era of my life, from the 13-year-old me with the printed leggings and severe lack of social skills, to high-school-freshman-year-me, who was unimaginably quiet and friendless, to high-school-senior-me, who finally felt comfortable in her own skin, to the 20-year-old me that exists now.
Everyone deserves a Rajonna, but not everyone is lucky enough to find one. No words are really enough to do justice to the feeling of having that kind of love in your life. So instead, I take comfort in the thought that whatever else changes — our music taste, our hometowns, ourselves — the certainty of her place in my life will not.
Shreya Tiwari is a junior from Austin, Texas, majoring in Biomedical Engineering. Her column shares stories about all the people, places and feelings with which she has “invisible strings,” intimate hidden connections that she hopes to reveal to readers with each piece.
