Resonant Souls Beyond the Soul Mate
On the strings we cross, and the ones still worth tending
By Braddon Damien White
A few nights ago, with Ryan away in New Jersey and the house quiet in the particular way it gets when someone you love is somewhere else, three faces surfaced that I hadn’t thought about together before — three people whose lives ended far too soon.
Three souls whose journeys touched mine and then, each in their own time, ended early.
I believe in soul mates. Not as a phrase borrowed from greeting cards, but as something closer to cosmology — one celestial soul, one companion across the eternities, a resonance so foundational it doesn’t need explaining, only recognizing. Ryan is mine. Whatever else is true of this life, meeting him inside it was a blessing I didn’t earn and don’t take lightly, however long this particular string of mine gets to run alongside his.
And yet the soul doesn’t resonate only once. If it did, this life would be a very lonely place between the moments that mattered most. What I’ve come to believe — what that quiet evening kept insisting on — is that a celestial soul, across however many incarnations it has lived, crosses paths with countless others it recognizes. Not the one. But a one, for a while. A companion for a stretch of road, chosen by something older than memory, felt long before it’s understood.
One was a missionary companion, though our connection went back further than either of us knew. Our mothers later told us we’d known each other as small children on the North Shore of Oahu, and neither of us remembered it, neither had any memory of the other from that time — and then, years later, we were paired as companions, strangers as far as we could tell, and became close in the months we served together. We were later assigned to different areas, different companions, and it was in that new area of his, not long after we’d separated, that his heart gave out. I stood and gave his eulogy. There was something in that — meeting as if for the first time a person you’d already known as a child, neither of you remembering, and resonating anyway.
Another was a companion from that same season of my life, someone I hadn’t known before the mission at all — no childhood overlap, no prior thread, just the coincidence of being placed together and finding something real in it. We grew close there. Years after we’d each gone our separate ways, he came to visit San Francisco, and we spent a brief afternoon together, easy and familiar as if no time had passed. A year or two after that visit, his life was cut short.
And a third was a coworker from my years at BYU — one of the first people I ever came out to, at a time when that was still tender, unfinished territory for me, and he met it with nothing but welcome. Years later, a kayak, an accident, a wife and two children left standing in the wreckage of an ordinary morning.
Three life strings. Three points where mine crossed theirs — briefly, unevenly, at different depths — and then didn’t cross anymore.
I’ve found myself asking whether I honored those connections the way they deserved. It’s not a comfortable question, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be. But here’s where the framework meets the ache instead of talking past it: I don’t actually know what those connections meant on their end. I can’t. The veil that shapes this life doesn’t just obscure the eternal — it obscures each other, most of the time, right down to the specifics. I can’t tell you exactly what my North Shore companion felt in the months we served together, once we’d found each other again without ever knowing we’d already met. I can’t tell you what stayed with my other companion from that one afternoon in San Francisco, years after the mission that first drew us close. I can’t tell you what my old coworker carried from being trusted with something I hadn’t told many people yet.
What I can tell you is what I hope. I hope that whatever pulled my soul toward theirs pulled something in them toward mine, too — not because I need it to be true to make peace with it, but because everything I felt in those connections suggests it. I trust that they carried something forward from crossing my string, some texture their soul didn’t have before, the way I carry what they gave me. That trust is not the same as certainty, and I’d rather offer it honestly as trust than dress it up as something I can’t actually know. Honoring a connection doesn’t require proof of what it meant to the other person. It only requires believing, as fully as you’re able, that it mattered — and living like that belief is worth something.
That’s where this stopped being only about grief and started being about everyone I haven’t lost yet.
Because most of the strings intertwined with ours right now are still intertwined. Still active. Still, in whatever quiet way a soul has of knowing these things, resonant. Maybe it’s an old friend you keep meaning to call. Maybe it’s a child, grown now, who’s found their way back into your life in a way you don’t want to take for granted again. Maybe it’s someone whose name you don’t even know — the person behind a counter who smiles at you the same way every week, whose life you know almost nothing about, and who you’d miss more than you’d expect if one week they just weren’t there. These are soul strings too. Ordinary, unremarkable, easy to walk past — and no less real for it.
Here’s the distinction I keep coming back to, the one I think matters most: some life strings end because that’s exactly what they were meant to do. The curriculum completes. The soul finishes what it came to experience with that particular resonance, and the string draws to its close — not tragedy, not failure, just an ending arriving on schedule, however painful it is to live through. That’s what I understood, writing about my father-in-law’s passing — the string had reached its end, and what was left to me was to reshape my own string forward, carrying what his had given mine.
But not every quiet string is an ending. Some are just untended. The pull is still there — the soul still recognizes it — but it’s gone slack, not because the journey together concluded, but because neither person kept hold of their end. That’s not fate. That’s not curriculum. That’s neglect, dressed up sometimes as busyness, sometimes as assuming the connection will simply keep without anyone doing anything to keep it. And I think the soul knows the difference, even when the mortal self can’t quite name what it’s feeling — a low, persistent sense that something has gone quiet that didn’t have to.
I don’t want to wait for the next string to end before I recognize what it was. I’d rather tend the ones still taut, while they’re still taut enough to feel the tension when I do.
So this is less a conclusion than an invitation, to myself as much as anyone reading this. Look at the resonances in your life right now — the loud ones and the quiet ones, the family and the near-strangers, the ones you’d grieve and the ones you’d barely notice were gone until you noticed. Some of those strings are nearing their natural end, and no tending will change that, and that’s all right. But others are only quiet because they’ve been left alone. Those are worth reaching for. Not out of guilt, and not out of fear of some future eulogy — just out of respect for what your soul already recognized in them, long before you had language for it.
Ryan is home now, and I’m glad for it in the plain, uncomplicated way you’re glad to have someone you love back under the same roof. But I want to be honest about what that gladness is and isn’t. His string never went slack while he was away. Distance isn’t neglect — a string can stretch across an ocean, across years, across a silence neither person intended, and stay taut the whole time, because tending isn’t about proximity. It’s about attention. It’s about whether the pull is still being met, wherever two people happen to be standing.
That’s the real thing that quiet night alone gave me — not a reminder to miss Ryan less, but a nudge to notice everyone else whose pull I might have stopped meeting, distance or no distance. I never have to wonder whether the resonance with Ryan is real. But knowing that isn’t permission to stop tending it — if anything, it’s the string I most want to keep taut, because I know exactly what I’d be losing.