Melissa Knox

Soul Mate

non-fiction

I was in our cluttered study, lobbing my dead husband’s old teaching files into garbage bags when I found the postcard of Death Valley, labeled “Death Valley,” in case anyone couldn’t tell. On the message side of the cracked mudflats and flyaway creosote bushes, his former girlfriend’s neat cursive loops proclaim, “I want this postcard to reaffirm my love, my devotion to you, to us.” She urges him to remember the “significance” of Death Valley, the love they shared, the commitments they “articulated.” The language has the ring of business, but apparently sucker-punched him. Her letters call him “soul mate,” a term I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole: it’s as tacky as polyester trying to pass as silk. 

I first saw her face after Josef and I had gone on a romantic hike through Bavarian scenery. Pretty sure he liked me, I was already head over heels. We stopped by his office to pick something up, and there—flaxen tresses flowing in the breeze, smile broad and toothy, a mighty glacier the backdrop—her framed image dominated the wall opposite his desk. Josef looked at me, asking, “What do you think of her?” 

Trying to hold back tears, I said, “She’s a very beautiful woman.”

We started messing around, kissing, one thing leading to another. Then he couldn’t come. “Mental block,” he said, glancing at the photo. Later, he said they had broken up over a year before, when he had told her, “We should never see each other again.” A melodramatic end to encounters that thrived in glaciers and deserts, going by the postcards and letters that kept popping up. 

On the last card that I found at the bottom of yet another box of old magazines and folders, a long-stem rose is flung on a heart drawn in the sand as if by a tango dancer whose lip had been pierced by a thorn. The Soul Mate crossed out the inscribed “Happy Anniversary,” leaving the “forever!” but she’s “unable to prioritize us.” She aches, she says, with his pain.

If only I’d been there to yell, “Crocodile tears!” 

Not long after Josef and I returned from our honeymoon, I came across that very same photo of the blonde glacier queen. He’d gone to a funeral, and I was unpacking moving boxes. I couldn’t resist opening a few envelopes of photos neatly labeled in blue Bic with her location. Helicoptering and bungee-jumping through tropical paradises filled with massive Megaherb leaves, deep lagoons, and those glittering glaciers, the horrifyingly lovely girlfriend grins beside Josef. He’s wearing pink flowered lei, for God’s sake. Putting the photos back where I had found them, I was still in a snit when he returned from the funeral—which had been a duty call, an old lady whom he hardly knew. To my surprise, he was almost in tears. 

“What’s the matter?” I asked. He embraced me with great feeling and his answer made me forget, for years, those photographs. He said, “I don’t want to think of the day when one of us will be without the other.”

I never wanted to think of that day—his words chilling me even as they hammered home his love—and I avoided doing so for as long as possible. But now that day had come and gone. Even moldy parts of the cellar we’d always planned to renovate into a sauna, odd piles and boxes and drawers, spewed those letters and cards. “Soul mate” just kept ringing in my ears. Did she have something I didn’t?

It occurred to me that I deserved that question he’d asked back in his office when he wondered what I thought of the siren on his wall.  Eight years before we actually got together, he flew to New York just to visit me. Madly in love, I’d pretended not to be. I’d taken bad advice to remain aloof, to avoid revealing my knee-loosening, heart-quickening, feelings. If Josef and I hadn’t managed through sheer luck to reconnect, I’d have thought back all my life on that one visit. On the heels of a heartbreaking thank-you note, in which he hopes it wasn’t too much trouble having him as a guest, he got involved with the beautiful blonde. He must have felt rejected, betrayed—just the kind of mood that leads a young man to meet exactly the wrong person. The kind he calls his soul mate.

Right after they got engaged, she applied for—and took—a job halfway across the globe. The further away she got, the more she wrote, in her letters and cards, that he was her soul mate—and the more he agreed. A year before he and I finally got together, they seemed to have finally split up; I only wish he were still around to tell the tale. I miss him the most when I want to talk to him. 

On a neatly folded page titled “Spiritual Journal” that stared up at me from the bottom of another dusty box, he seems to be coming off the high. He writes, “Maybe marriage to J--- would not have been a constant joy. Who knows? She is my soul mate, but not having her will also have its positive effects.” He hopes God will guide him to “the right one.” That would be me, who, like all his girlfriends, including the Soul Mate, turned out to be atheists or lapsed Catholics. There’s no denying his desire to meet and marry a woman of whom his deeply Catholic parents would approve. But, it seemed, he felt drawn exclusively to non-religious women. 

He wanted romance and sex, and he found both in me, but I can’t cast myself as a soul mate. Two more different people (The New Yorker and the village boy; the atheist and the Catholic; the anxious one and the calm one) cannot be imagined. Yet we longed to please each other. I was giddy with delight because he loved to hold hands. We wanted children, family. In the end, togetherness seduced him, soothed him, and consoled him, as it did me. If I go by Soul Mate’s scattered communications, togetherness seems tame, boring.

The jealous wife, tiring of phrases like “mind, body & soul,” as she shuffles through the (after all, yellowed with age) cards, draws inspiration from Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, assuring the prince that what happens after he rescues her is that she rescues him right back. That, I mutter, patting myself on the back, is what I did. The crumbs his golden girl tossed him—“Big hug,” “Big sigh,” “I want to share with you,”—seem dry as the sand dunes she remembers after his proposal: “the date, the inscription, the emotions of fulfillment, joy, nervousness, happiness.” Nervousness is hardly the stuff of love. Nervousness is the worry that things have gone too far. “I will love you forever” is what she writes on the card letting him know they’ve broken up.

Her correspondence—I wish I had his replies—suggests to me that she was swimming in the passion of separation, the joy of reunion, the largeness of emotion—but not in love for him. She remained his soul mate, in the sense that she jealously guarded his soul, letting it bob to the surface occasionally, float within her grasp. He gazed at her with his wonderful blue eyes; she saw herself reflected in those pools of trust. The more she saw of herself, the more she wanted to see, until, because he was a very kind man, he allowed her to pull him in with her, almost forever. 

I like to think that I fished him out of that lovely, but deadly pool. Now, after our twenty years together, our three children, and after his death, I gloat that after all, I got there first! I had the prior claim. I just didn’t have the courage to follow my heart. If he’d stayed with the siren, if one of them had moved and given up a career to be with the other, there’d have been no glorious anticipation of reunion, no uncertainty about whether or when they’d next manage to see each other. Not, his short spiritual journal reflects that “constant joy,” the kind I’d call manic. There’d have been no children, for she didn’t want them. If they’d had to swim in a lagoon located on the same continent, wouldn’t the romance have dried up? By the time they broke up, he seems to have figured that out. 

Shortly before Josef and I married, he had a dream. His family was gathered around his old father, helping him to put on his socks and shoes. They worked hard, all together, and the dream ended happily, the socks and shoes securely encasing the old man’s feet. He wondered what that could possibly mean. I smiled. “You had cold feet,” I said, “but now your feet are warm.” He took my hand. It was around that time that he let slip his former flame’s timing, her job application on the heels of his proposal. 

“She never wanted to marry you!” I burst out. “Who moves to another time zone two minutes after they’ve accepted a marriage proposal?”

He blushed and laughed. Admitting this struck him as mean; he felt the need to say that after all, she was a “nice person.” But he relied on me for the eye roll when he became absurdly kind. His order and calm relaxed me—I basked in it. No, we were never soul mates. Roommates, lovers, parents—on our wedding invitation he wrote that we were planning “to go through life together.” And that’s just what we did. 

Melissa Knox's memoir, Divorcing Mom: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis, was published by Cynren Press in 2019. Recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Lamplit Underground, and Image Journal. Read more of her writing here: https://melissaknox.com