Amrita Anand, Mirage

Mirage

Amrita Anand

Studies show that soul-patterns between partners that complement each other are more likely to signify a lasting, healthy relationship rather than partners whose soul-patterns complete each other. While the correlation between dependence and the completion of soul-patterns is yet to be investigated, speculation invites the idea that power dynamics are shaped by the need for completion of a soul through dialogue with another. The mentality behind partners having to complete each other has already begun to change, and researchers from the National Soul Institute claim that compatibility via soul-patterns is a causation, due to healthy communication between partners in a relationship …

Medha slumped back in her seat and sighed, pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes. She hadn’t begun this search by looking into the soulpatterns of people in healthy romantic relationships, but the patterns of those lacking romantic partners at all.

Her phone chimed with a text. She checked who the sender was, and brightened.

Found your missing piece yet?

Coming from Jacen, it was light-hearted, teasing, like he was referencing an in-joke. Her soul had long since complemented his, though their bond was far from romantic. She found herself grinning even as she sent back, Can’t find what wasn’t missing in the first place.

An instantaneous beep. You know that I don’t see any missing pieces in your soul, yeah?

Replying with a quick yeah, see you later, she sank back against her chair. It creaked loudly.

In a world where one’s soul was visible to the world as a strange, shifting puzzle, it was impossible to escape commentary about one’s “pieces.” Not that she’d ever really cared about it—people grew and changed. Perhaps it was useful for a quick personality sweep or some sort of parlor trick where she’d simply pick out the most generic patterns she could find and repeat what she’d read about them in the studies she’d looked up near-obsessively. It got people ooh-ing and aah-ing every time.

Medha idly scrolled down the rest of the article, the words blurring across the screen until the large, bold typesetting of a title of a different article caught her attention enough for her to focus her sight again. She’d been complaining about the infinite scroll function on these websites the other day, but just this once, she would let it slide.

The Illusive Soul-Piece: Why some people think others’ souls are incomplete when they’re actually not

Not the best of titles, but it did catch her attention.

She kept scrolling.

Accounts of this particular phenomenon have only appeared to surface in the last seventy years, but the dilemma that people face regarding these supposedly “missing” soul-pieces has likely been around for far longer. A recent survey shows that people whose souls are on display have been increasingly asked about a singular missing piece, though when they searched for it themselves, they only saw a whole soul-puzzle without any gaps. Studies have investigated this in the last fifty years, and chalked it

up to lack of self-awareness, with people occasionally being sent to soul specialists in order to find out how to “fix” these gaps in their souls.

Medha blinked. That sounded a lot like her situation, though she hadn’t been sent to specialists yet. She mentally thanked her parents for their lack of involvement in the matter, and kept reading.

Those who spoke to us about their “missing” soul-pieces admitted that they found the methods used functionally useless, and unchanging of the outcome. 76% of those surveyed reported that they preferred to keep their souls hidden from view, so as to not invite such comments anymore. This only increased the “nagging,” as an anonymous subject commented, and requests to display their souls to others. The association of concealment of one’s soul with that of “having something [unpleasant about their personality] to hide” has compounded the suspicion that these individuals garner from those in professional environments.

This wasn’t particularly new, Medha thought, clicking out of the window and gently shutting her laptop. She stretched in her chair and stood. The chair creaked again. She’d need to get it replaced.

Her thoughts were a maelstrom in her mind. If there was nothing to be done about the “missing” soul-piece, then why did so many strangers concern themselves with it? Soul-patterns were only occasionally commented on, but the idea of missing a piece entirely was worrying— especially when she didn’t see it.

Her sister had thought it belonged to someone else—that when she met them, the missing piece would slot right into place. Soulmates, in a world where souls were visible as puzzles to the rest, were far more tangible than fiction made it out to be. There was none of the abstraction to it—if two people had compatible souls, their patterns would shift and begin to

complement each other. Medha had quickly done away with that idea, even the thought of somehow being “incomplete” without some specific person making her stomach churn. But there was nothing to be done, and her sister fantasized about what she wanted to.

It was, after all, harmless.

She tried to keep the bitterness out of her words, knowing the truth all the while—that there was nothing missing within her, and there never had been.

She let her soul retract into the flesh and muscle and bone of her body, visible only to herself in the dead of the night. The pieces had different patterns on them now, but stayed the same, because growth.

None of it countered the feeling of her skin crawling whenever she kept her soul totally hidden from view. She’d used to display it constantly before, but the onslaught of concerned remarks about her soul-piece had had her retreating into a shell like a frightened turtle.

Medha didn’t feel frightened, though. Just exhausted.

Eventually, she let her soul unfurl unconsciously, too tired to conceal it constantly. It would show to an instinctive amount, now. The exhaustion turned into—not apathy, but indifference. She stopped thinking about the looks she got from family she visited in the holidays, discarded the unwarranted referrals to specialists in the area, and walked onward with her blinders on.

Perhaps she’d never convince others that she was perfectly whole. Maybe she’d go old and gray by the time they took her seriously. Medha looked into the mirror, one last time, at her soul, and watched it turn a deep and proud gold.