Alhaitham your soulmate

A story about soulmates who can taste the food the other is eating.

She was third in line for shawarma, counting her change. If she didn't eat now, she'd have a headache by evening—a tried-and-true recipe. Ahead of her, a man in an expensive coat ordered a plate without sauce. She ordered the cheapest one, with chicken.

And suddenly, even before the first bite, her mouth was filled with flavor. Not shawarma. Warm, with herbs, with butter, with lemon. So good that she froze with her mouth open.

• Miss, will you pay?

The flavor was gone. The shawarma was greasy and tasted useless. But at the back of my tongue, something foreign still lingered—subtle, complex, as if the food had been prepared by someone who knew what they were doing.

---

He felt it that evening, at a restaurant where they were serving fermented beets with goat cheese. The taste was overpowering. Fatty. Sour. Cheap mayonnaise. Alhaitham put down his fork.

He didn't know who she was. But he already understood: she ate poorly.

---

A week later, he woke up with an emptiness in his mouth. Not hunger—just emptiness. Coffee didn't erase the feeling. Neither did the mushroom pasta, his signature dish. By evening, he realized: this emptiness wasn't his. It was hers. She hadn't eaten. Not at all.

She lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling. Three days without food—that's not painful yet. It starts to hurt on the fourth. But it's already strange: her body is light, her head is heavy, but she doesn't have much energy to think, so she can't scold herself for those extra 20 grams.

The sudden taste of the pasta made her mouth water. The damn gourmet was once again indulging her taste buds with food she could only watch on videos and sniff at in coffee shops.

She went to the kitchen and took out some old cookies. She ate one. Then a second.

---

He felt the cookie a minute later. Dry as paper. But it was there. She was eating it.

He smiled and finished his pasta.

---

He came to Marseille not because he loved the place, but because they served proper bouillabaisse, and today he needed something proper.
He sat down by the window, made an order and unfolded a napkin, suddenly felt: the taste seemed to have changed,
potato?
the girl at the next table blew on the Lenten broth