Author’s Note: Please please please let me know what you think. I’m new at this and I’d love to hear any and all feedback.
You are sitting in your lecture hall lightly tapping your pen on your thumb and daydreaming while waiting for your professor to make an appearance. It’s the first day of your first semester as a freshman in college, and it's already off to a boring start. Other students are still flooding into the room, and you catch a glimpse of an older man in a sweater with a white collar peeking out of the top and a blazer out of the corner of your eye. He walks with purpose to the front of the hall and places his briefcase on the wooden desk before turning to the class.
As you watch him wait for everyone to take a seat, you feel heat on the palm of your hand. The hand that holds your counter. Everyone has one. It counts how much time you’ve spent in the presence of your soulmate. You quickly bring your palm up to your face and watch as the numbers slowly increase; seconds turning into minutes. Instinctively, your eyes start to roam around the room taking in every person there. There are quite a few others looking at their hands as well, but you can’t tell if it’s because their counter has started counting or because it’s stopped. You look as closely as you can from your position in the back row, but you can’t see anyone’s face. If you weren’t as shy as you are, you’d probably have the courage to get up and talk to someone; anyone really. But, you are. Shy that is. Extremely so.
Unfortunately, the professor starts his lesson before you can think about it anymore. The class is only an hour long, but the professor’s monotonous droning makes it seem so much longer. You could feel yourself almost nodding off a few times during the hour-long lecture.
As quickly as you can manage without tripping and injuring yourself and others, you beat feet out of the hall and release a soft, dejected sigh when you feel the warmth leave your palm. Your counter has stopped, which means you're no longer in the presence of your soulmate. With your shoulders slightly slumped, you make your way to your next class. Your counter doesn’t activate again.
The next morning is the same. And so is every morning for the next two weeks. You walk into class and try to pinpoint your soulmate in the sea of students that flood through the open doorway, but to no avail. There are just too many people walking through the door at the same time for you to be able to tell for sure which one is your soulmate. After the second week of not being able to pick out who could possibly be your soulmate, you decide to give up. Surely they must feel it, too. Maybe they’ll be braver than you are and come to find you. Maybe they just don’t want to be found.
As you sit in your second class, you look down at your counter. Sure enough, in the two weeks, since classes started, you’ve clocked just over ten hours in the presence of your soulmate. As you stare at it dejectedly, you gasp as it suddenly comes to life again and starts counting. Your head shoots up and you look around frantically trying to see what is different today than it was yesterday. But, nothing is different. Everything is exactly the same as it had been yesterday. So, why is your counter ticking away? Is it defective? It can’t be, though. It’s something everyone is born with; a gene mutation that formed over time. But, what other explanation is there?
Questions plagued your every thought as you robotically made your way through your school day, and then once again on your way home. You were so lost in your head that you didn’t notice you were crossing at a red light. You're brought out of your stupor by the sound of a horn blaring, and you look up in time to see headlights coming straight for you. Frozen in shock, you literally can’t move. The car is meters away when suddenly, there's a flash of black, and then everything is silent.
