Soul Mates
As I walked down the street, I looked at all the sad sacks of shit around me. They all put on a happy front, but everyone knew how depressing they were. Even themselves.
That man sitting on the bench. That lady in her car. The guy working at the hot-dog stand. The chick at the bar.
They were all sad. Lonely.
The children playing soccer in the corner weren't, but they would be in a few years. They were destined for loneliness the moment they went through puberty.
Soul-mates. A disgusting concept, and one that this world operated on.
In this world, there existed only one other person who you were both romantically and sexually compatible with. Who you were 'oriented' towards. And no other person would be able to fulfill the role of your soul-mate. No other person would be emotionally fulfilling. No other person would be able to make you happy.
One would know who their soul-mate was upon meeting them. There would be a 'click' of personalities. Of emotion. Of feeling. The moment you heard your soul-mate's voice, saw their face, or felt their touch, you would know it was them.
And that was why this world sucked.
There were seven billion humans. And only one of them was your soul mate.
The odds of meeting your soul-mate were so low, that it wasn't even funny.
Most people would never meet their 'destined one' simply due to living on different parts of the globe. Sometimes, a person's soul-mate would die a premature death, eliminating any chance of them ever meeting. There were plenty of reasons as to why any given set of two people would meet each other, but there were many more reasons for why they would not.
It was a matter of probability. And the odds were low.
Of course, some people were lucky. They met their soul mate on a trip to Asia, or at a tourist-destination (very popular places, by the way). Maybe they were in a busy city walkway, where bodies were so packed that one would see thousands of faces and touch hundreds of bodies on the way to work, and had been traveling through that walkway every day for years before they finally got lucky.
But that kind of thing was one in a million. Or actually, one in around five-hundred-thousand, which was a bit better, but still horrible. Because it meant that for every person who found genuine love, there were four-hundred-and-ninety-nine-thousand others who did not, and stayed alone and loveless for their entire lives.
Some people would commit horrible atrocities in a desperate bid to make their faces as well-known as possible, through the news. Some people would attempt to become well-known performers and actors. Some people would try to use social media to get their faces and voices out there.
Still, the number of people who found love stayed low.
Some people would get together and pretend that they loved each other. Some people would say they were asexual or didn't need love to be happy, though very few of them would be telling the truth. But no matter how much they lied to themselves, they would never be happy.
In this world of soul-mates, those who were happy only made up less than a hundredth of the population.
In this world of soul-mates, everybody was unhappy.
And that was the truth.