Finding the One for Me

So I've recently gotten out of an internet relationship. During and prior to the relationship, it had been my belief that there is only one person, one soulmate for each person in the world. I had believed that the person I was in the relationship with was in fact the only person for me.

I'm not going to go into the details of our fight, but we are completely finished with each other. As I was nursing my wounds, I heard an episode of "This American Life." The episode was about people looking for and indeed finding the person of their dreams, and given my present situation it almost seemed to be divine intervention that I should heard that particular broadcast at that time.

The story began with a Harvard Physcist talking about how he and his peers had been joking how none of them had girlfriends, and the ensuing discusion. During the course of their dialogue they brought up the Drake Equation, a formula used to calculate the number of planets in the universe that may be able to support life. What the scientists did was, in short, replace planets with Girlfriends. They took the number of people in Boston (300,000), and when all of a sudden done, they had narrowed the number down to just 1200, which wasn't even including personal preferences such as religion or interests.

However the physicist being interviewed mentioned that the was only the city of Boston, and that there are billions of people in the world. He said, (and this really inspired me), "You gotta believe there that there's more then one. If you think there's only one, GOOD LUCK. They could speak Chinese. Good luck finding them and the translator."

I realized, with a dawning euphoria reminiscent of Archimedes, that this statement was incontrovertibly true, and that out of the billions of people on the planet earth, there was in fact more then one singular female that I could love.

A smile grew slowly but surely across my face, an expression that seemed peculiar on the brown skin of my face, as a smile hadn't traced it in several days.