Prologue

The beginning of it all.

I still remember the first time I dared talk about the red strings. It comes back to me, like a damnable deja vu that you can’t seem to shake. I remember my voice shaking, as my emotions came to a head, and I bit the inside of my cheeks hoping he didn’t think I was deranged.

I remember he tilted his head, a bit like a dog when it hears a new sound it can’t identify.

“But, if you know how it all ends, then why are you so stressed?” he asked. “If I saw how it all played out, I think I would just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

I clenched and unclenched my jaw a few times and swallowed hard, trying to suffocate my answer even though I knew I had no choice.

“If you met someone, and just knew that they were the one, but you didn’t know how long it would take, or when it would finally happen, and you couldn’t say anything and you had to just play along, you don’t think your heart would shatter to pieces every time they said ‘I love you’ to someone else?

“You don’t think you would feel the weight on your chest as they went about their life like you didn’t exist, and you hear the voice inside your head screaming at them to just open their eyes and finally see you? And it’s taking so long, you’re wondering if maybe this time you got it wrong, maybe the strings are lying, or they’ve been messing with you the whole time and there is no one waiting on the other side of that string. You wonder if they’ll ever wake up, or maybe you’re the one who needs to wake up.”

He smiled at me with the eyes of a man who understood I fully believed what I was saying, but wasn’t quite sure he believed it himself.

“Well, let’s get you a cup of coffee and see what happens.”

---

I couldn’t really say when I first saw the strings. It all really started with one hell of a deja vu. I was sitting with some friends at a bar, and it came over me, that crawling sensation that we’ve had this conversation before. But then it was like someone pushed fast forward, and I saw the guy across the room who’d been downing tequila shots all night fall off his seat. Five minutes later, he actually fell off his seat.

I shook it off as the result of one too many shots myself, and with time, forgot about the incident. But every now and again, they would come back. Little moments of deja vu with a fast forward button. The most insignificant things, like what a customer was going to order, or what dress my friend would be wearing when she walked through the door. Sometimes I’d get two in a week, sometimes months would go by before it happened again.

I remember one drunken night, after it had happened again at work, I confided in a friend that this wasn’t the first time it had happened, and she laughed and told me I got the s**t end of the superpower stick.

And when I was drunk, it felt like the prequel to a  superpower story. I’d stand outside the bar at the end of a long night, smoking a cigarette while waiting for a cab, thinking, maybe this was the beginning of something special. Maybe this was my ticket to getting out of my 80 hour weeks at my minimum wage job. If I tried hard enough, maybe I could control what I saw.

Visions of high stakes poker games, winning lottery numbers, and stock market winnings played out in front of my eyes. Then I’d go home, sleep for a few hours before the alarm jolted me awake for my morning shift, and it would all be forgotten.

After all, they were just the fantasies of a girl working two jobs, trying to make it in New York City, dreaming of the day she didn’t have to steal toilet paper from the McDonald’s down the block.

It would take years before I understood what they were. They weren’t a fluke, and they weren’t my secret superpower. They would never land me the winning lottery numbers, or give me my ticket to the top of the ladder.

They were a calling; a purpose. They would lead me down a life of insurmountable loneliness, as I pulled together the red strings for those that crossed my path, able to see everyone’s happy ending; everyone’s, but mine.

That is, until I saw him, and everything got a whole lot more complicated.