There is an old belief that when two people are destined to love each other, the heavens grow careless and shape them with similar hands. Not enough for mothers to mistake one for the other in crowded streets, but enough for the world to feel briefly unsettled whenever they stand side by side.
Enough for strangers to look twice. Enough for mirrors to hesitate.
I did not believe this at first. The world, after all, is full of repetitions. Cathedrals echo one another across countries that they have never met. The rain drizzles again each June dressed in the same mourning gray. Even grief has a familiar face regardless of who carries it. So when people pointed out there were pieces of you in my smile, I dismissed it as coincidence.
But then I began noticing the smaller things — the way both of us pause before answering difficult questions, with the peculiar habit of staring too long at departing trains. There are moments with you that feel less like meeting someone new and more like rediscovering something misplaced in my childhood. Sometimes, when you look at me for too long, I feel as though my reflection has escaped every mirror I have ever known just to stand in front of me, breathing.
The gods, perhaps, are not architects of precision but creatures of longing themselves. And so, when they adore a pair of souls too much, they forget to make them entirely different.
You and I are molded as if we were written from the same draft before we were ever born — two verses separated into different poems, two pieces of dusk carrying identical shades of blue. And ever since, heaven has spent generations trying to correct its own mistake by allowing fragments of your shadow to embody my human flesh.
There are nights I think about the gods watching us from somewhere beyond the stars, smiling quietly to themselves at the sight of two familiar faces finally standing before one another after lifetimes of near encounters and almosts.
All this time, they had been imitating your eyes in my own, my sorrow in yours, leaving small traces for us to follow until I would finally look at you and understand why my soul always felt incomplete in solitude.
It was the gods, in all their infinite yearning, making the same soul twice — and waiting patiently for the day both versions found their way back to each other.
- Sean Clifford M. Malinao
(Illustration by Bea Katrina Fulgencio/FEU Advocate)