Maybe if I drank enough, this entire day would disappear.
Maybe if I drank enough, I’d wake up in my apartment in New Haven and discover this was all a stress-induced hallucination.
“The thing about soulmates,” she continued, apparently capable of talking indefinitely without requiring oxygen, “is that they’re not always what you expect. Sometimes the universe pairs people who seem completely opposite because that’s how growth happens. You challenge each other. You balance each other. Like yin and yang. Light and dark. Order and chaos. Which is clearly us, right? You’re very structured and organized, and I’m more... fluid. Intuitive. I go where the universe guides me, and you probably have a five-year plan color-coded by priority level—”
Fourth whiskey.
The bartender was giving me a look. I ignored him.
“—which is perfect because I need someone to ground me and you need someone to help you loosen up and embrace spontaneity and trust the universe instead of trying to control everything—which you clearly do. I can tell just by looking at you, you have very controlled energy, very rigid, like you’re holding yourself together with a sheer force of will—”
There were definitely two of her now.
Two identical women with wild curly hair and bright eyes and voices that wouldn’t stop talking about the universe and cosmic connections and spiritual energy.
I blinked hard, trying to merge them back into one person.
It didn’t work.
“—and that’s exhausting, right? Trying to control everything all the time? The universe wants you to let go. To trust. To surrender to the flow of destiny. Which is what this is. Us meeting. It’s destiny. Capital D destiny. The kind that’s written in the stars and woven into the fabric of reality itself—”
Fifth whiskey.
Or was it the sixth?
I’d lost count.
The two versions of her were now possibly three. They were all talking at once, a chorus of cosmic nonsense that was somehow getting louder despite the fact that I was drinking specifically to make it quieter.
This isn’t working, I thought desperately.She’s multiplying. I’m making it worse.
But I couldn’t stop now. Stopping would mean acknowledging reality. And reality was unacceptable.
Reality involved a woman who thought we were soulmates because she’d bumped into me in a casino and felt “cosmic energy.”
Reality involved my carefully planned Vegas trip turning into absolute chaos.
Reality involved me sitting in a bar, getting progressively drunker while listening to an extended lecture on universal consciousness and spiritual alignment.
No, reality could go to Hell.
I was staying right here in this pleasant, fuzzy, increasingly blurry space where nothing made sense and maybe, just maybe, if I drank enough, she would literally vanish into thin air like a cosmic hallucination.
Poof.
Gone.
Never to be heard from again.
“—because the universe doesn’t bring people together randomly,” one of her said. Or maybe all three of them said it in unison. “Every meeting has meaning. Every connection has a purpose. And our connection issignificant. I can feel it. Can’t you feel it? That pull? That magnetic attraction? That sense of...”
I picked up what I desperately hoped was my seventh whiskey and drank it in one long swallow.
The room tilted slightly.
The three versions of her blurred together, then separated again, then did a little dance that might have been real or might have been my brain giving up entirely.
“You’re very quiet,” she said. Or they said. The cosmic chorus of chaos. “Are you okay? You look a little... unfocused.”
