Soulmates

28th May, 2025

This is a bit odd, but... spoilers ahead for the His Dark Materials book series by Philip Pullman; The Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass.

Also, if you haven't read them, they're my favourite book series and you really frickin should oh my god-


I first read these when I was maybe in my young teens, possibly a lil earlier. A lot of it went over my head at the time - at the highest level, they are about a war against God, and predictably have the associated Themes^tm.

But on a more important level, they are really just about a pair of teenagers trying to fucking survive in the middle of it all.

In these books, souls are composed of a particle that's just as detectable as photons or electrons or whatever else¹. The particles are given many funny names, but the most common one is simply Dust, after a biblical verse. Your soul decays and dissipates upon death, the same as your body - gradually, subject to a number of factors, but quite inevitably.

And like your body, the constituent particles become part of everything else again, and over time are recombined into new things.

Over the course of the books, our two dumb kids fall wonderfully, beautifully, innocently in love. As is the way with these things, everyone notices this well before they do, and it isn't really acknowledged by them until one scene very near the end of the third book:

--- [Direct spoilers here!] ---

"D'you think you'll get married?"
He was quiet a long time. She knew he was thinking, though.
"I can't see that far ahead," he said. "It would have to be someone who understands about... I don't think there's anyone like that in my world. Would you get married?"
"Me too," she said, and her voice wasn't quite steady. "Not to anyone in my world, I shouldn't think."

Oh yeah, did I mention that our starcrossed protagonists are from two different parallel worlds?
A little later:

Then Lyra took one of those little red fruits. With a fast beating heart, she turned to him and said, "Will..."
And she lifted the fruit gently to his mouth.
She could see from his eyes that he knew at once what she meant, and was too joyful to speak. Her fingers were still at his lips, and he felt them tremble, and he put his own hand up to hold hers there, and then neither of them could look; they were confused; they were brimming with happiness.

This paragraph is etched in my heart. It is the foundation of what love means to me; it is the reason I find feeding someone to be such an intimate and important experience. If I have ever placed something in your mouth, platonically or otherwise², I fucking trust you.

But, back to Dust... there is one more part to this. No more than a couple chapters later, Lyra and Will make an important but devastating discovery.

They can save the worlds - all of them, because their worlds have been dying. But the cost is the doors between those worlds; they must all be closed. And in a contrived twist of fate, they realise that this means saying goodbye. Because people cannot survive outside their own worlds for too long.

So there is another paragraph that lives quite rent-free with me:

"I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I make my way out of the land of the dead I'll drift about for ever, all my atoms, till I find you again..."
"I'll be looking for you Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won't just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight..."

If the previous paragraph was the foundation, then this is the structure, the bones, the beating heart of love, to me. I cannot say these words too often; I had to check the book to quote most of this, but this sentence I know by heart.

And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won't just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight...

This is my conception of love. This is my conception of the afterlife; such as I have one at all. This is why loyalty is my highest virtue.

This is what a soulmate is, to me.

I know that's a contentious topic; I brought it up in one of my other entries recently. You don't have to agree with me, either that the concept exists or that it matches my beliefs. This is what it means to me.

You can have more than one soulmate, and more than one at a time. Yes, it is a bond that surpasses this life, if you want it to, if you believe that's a thing. It doesn't have to be the most important thing in the world, or it can be world-defining.

It's more than just falling in love. "Falling" implies an accident, something that 'just happened'. That's a beautiful thing too, and it's usually the first step.

But more than that and most of all, it is a choice. You choose your soulmates. It is a conscious decision, one you continue to make for every moment of that bond. It's probably even revocable - I don't feel like it is for me, not ever fully, but I suppose I probably won't know while I'm here.

There's other words and terms for it, if you prefer. Life partners. Found family. Packmates. They each have their shades of meaning.

But this is what I believe: That there are people I have chosen, with whom I will do as Will and Lyra did, on some level. Some part of me and some part of them is perhaps forever linked, even if it is only a small part. We will see each other again, no matter how long we spend drifting - if that is what they want too.

I've talked a little about this before, recently. These are the people who I could go years without seeing, without exchanging a word, and no matter what terms we parted on I would welcome them back in an instant, for a day or for the rest of this lifetime.

This is all very sappy and spiritual and metaphysical. Bet some of you didn't know I had a spiritual side, huh? But it's actually kinda important to me.

I don't think I needa be any more explicit about who those people are. Some of them will never read this, so it doesn't matter.

Others will, and already know, so I don't need to say it.

A few might read this and not realise, and I pray I figure out how to tell you some day: "I think I will love you forever, now."


...thanks for coming along on this dumb ride of an entry. Please go read those books, if you're the reading type, and you haven't yet. Even if I have spoiled a major part of the ending... well, you made your choice to read this. I just hope you want to know the rest.

Maybe you understand me a little better. Maybe you're a random stranger, in which case I'm quite pleasantly surprised. Maybe I just seem like a sappy, melodramatic fool. That's okay.

Goodnight y'all 💚💛