There is one person destined to be with me. One person who's mark matches mine perfectly. A soul split in two according to some, or maybe we're just meant to be. The world moves, and shifts, and changes, but one thing stays the same. There's one person destined to be with me, and that person is not her.

It's not unusual to date someone your not destined to be with. The knowledge that a perfect match is out there waiting doesn't prevent people from trying and failing to love others while they're waiting. Some people never meet their match, some people lose them. But more often than not any previous relationships will be left by the wayside as soon as that person appears.

I'm lucky, I've known who my soulmate was since I was eight years old. My mark is very visible, two triangles touching on the side of my neck. It's been on display for all my whole life, there was no hiding it. When his family moved to town it took less than a day for me to find out my match had arrived. The news travelled quickly.

We were young, so there was a concerted effort not to put any pressure on us. We would find each other in the end whether we wanted to or not. It was fate.

As teenagers we rebelled, as teenagers often do. Neither of us wanted to be told what to do, or who to be with whether it came from parents, teachers, or fate. We reacted in different ways. He was determined to never fall in love and I was determined to fall in love with everyone I met. I would kiss, and touch, and sleep with anyone that let me. It felt like control, until it didn't.

Oddly it was rebellion we bonded over. We would meet and complain about how unfair it was that no one would ever give us a chance. Everyone knew we were matched, it was okay to have a little fun but it could never be anything more. Eventually after one too many heartbreaks we decided to stop fighting.

He was nice, he was. We would have been content. We actually got on reasonably well when we weren't trying to treat each other like a tragic romance hero. We might even had been happy.

That's when I met her.

Things were better when I stopped looking. People stopped looking at me like I was broken for not wanting to be with someone supposedly perfect for me. They stopped whispering about his lack of interest in other girls. It was just easier.

She seemed to come out of nowhere. I was minding my own business and there she was at my front door, smiling like she didn't know what to do with her teeth. Confused to find me instead of the person she was looking for. She had knocked on the wrong door. It was an accident. Fate pushed me and him together but a mistake brought her into my life. She ended up staying for tea.

It was nothing at first. I wasn't looking for love, or sex, or anything more than friendship. I was content to let fate have her way, so I figured it didn't matter if I hung out with a girl who's smile just happened to make my heart flutter. I even told him about her, of course I did, he was my closest friend by default at that point. He was happy, wanted me to have companionship as he threw himself into work. Not that he would have stopped if I hadn't found someone to talk to, but he felt less guilty about it if I was distracted as well. .

We never talked about matches, me and her, it wasn't a conscious choice but somewhere along the way we both decided it was better left unsaid. She never mentioned whether she met hers, or if she wanted too. Although I didn't see her mark for some time, it was tucked above her hip, she saw mine from the very first day. Right there on display for everyone to see.

The first time she touched me, she touched my mark. She reached up and ran her fingers down my neck like it belonged to her. My body felt like the embers of a fire taking light. It was so powerful I thought for a moment that maybe I had been mistaken about my mark. Perhaps it was not the same as his. Perhaps they were just quite similar without being technically a match, there was precedent for that. Although mistaken matches were more often than not confined to fairy tales and romance novels.

It was nice, feeling for a moment that things might work out. That maybe the reason I had never connected to him was because we were wrong. The slither of hope was enough to pull my wall down enough to let in her in and once she was in there was no letting go.

The weather got warmer and her t-shirts got shorter. One day we were dancing in my living room and her shirt got caught revealing the unmistakably circular symbol just above her hipbone. It shattered me, although not as much as it should have. I don't think I ever really believed there was a chance we were matched. A large part of me didn't want to be matched to her because it didn't feel like enough. What I felt for her was conscious and tangible in way that the matches weren't. I didn't want to be matched to her, I wanted to chose her.

He noticed, of course he noticed we'd known each other for so long it was impossible not to pick up on such a significant shift in mood. He noticed, just like fate said he would and for the first time I lied to him.

Lying to him was surprisingly easy. Probably because he didn't want to know the truth any more than I wanted to tell him. We had reached a precarious balance, we knew any shake up would force us to make decisions we didn't want to make.

Pretending, lying, compartmentalising, never touching or acting on the ache I felt for her. It was fine for a while until it wasn't.

"Be my match," she said one day her hand in mine, her eyes on mine.

It was such a simple question that blew my world from flat to round. She asked just like that, like it was a choice we got to make, like we weren't bound to the legacy of fate. It hurt like everything I knew was being muddled and rewritten, but then everything was clear. As sudden as the pain of revelation had been the truth was there as though it had been there all along.

"I don't want to be your match," I said gripping her hand as she tried to pull away in disappointment begging her to let me finish. "I want to be your choice."

Her face told the story of emotion I had felt when she asked to be my match. Confusion, pain, understanding, and finally joy. Because no matter how much we wanted it, we would never be each other's match but that wasn't everything. We could be something else. We could be something better.

He seemed almost relieved when I told him, which I should have seen coming. It makes a lot of sense that fate would match me to someone that was as interested in having a soul mate as I was. Turns out we were a perfect pairing in that way, we both wanted out of destiny all we had to do was have the courage to speak up.

Plans moved quickly and quietly. We didn't tell anyone. They wouldn't understand and we weren't looking to inspire a revolution. Many were happy being matched, we didn't want to take that away from them. All we wanted was the chance to live the life we chose. Me and her, we chose each other. We chose our own happily ever after.

The moment came to leave and it was harder than I expected to say goodbye. We would stay in touch but without habit and determination to keep us together we were likely to lose contact over time, we knew that.

We looked at each other one last time, my match and me, before we split for good and spread ourselves across the world. Moving to opposite ends of the globe was more accidental than intentional. He had a research fellowship at a top university, and I had to follow the woman I loved to her home town - they were more tolerant of the mismatched she said.

There was one person out there that was destined for me, but he was not who I wanted, not who I chose. Perhaps instead of romance, we were destined to help each other depart from each other and from tradition.