Tinder and embers
As the months pass, I appear on your grid in photos and comments, woven into the great tapestry of your life.
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I remember your profile amongst the sea of users and how your pictures made me imagine a life that wasn’t real yet. Relationship tapas — that’s what online dating feels like. Before you, there were many potential lives I’d crafted in my head that came crashing down. Lives that took me to Italy and Iceland. Lives that lived and died in my daydreams. It’s frighteningly easy to superimpose oneself in existences that don’t exist.
My phone buzzed to announce the match. The dream becomes lucid and the chat is blank. A lot hinges on this first interaction, so I craft my replies like weapons. As we message one another, my breath catches in my throat as we enter the flow state that allows our words to bounce back and forth, weightless like a basketball.
We try and fail to meet because in the city, plans never align. It would be so easy to give up at this point, to watch the embers of another almost-relationship fade to black. There’s nothing more humiliating than letting something so small matter to you. Yet, I think of you a few times per day. New matches roll in, new noise, but I can still hear the sound of your name. Something about you makes me want to bother. You’re already a part of my life, even though I only understand you through pixels.
We met in a bar on a dark January night. The air outside was so cold that breathing it in was like ecstasy. I look up and see you for the first time and I’m so glad I didn’t give up. Before falling asleep, I message you to say that I had a nice time. I fall asleep hoping that you won’t turn into a ghost who haunts my life.
Now that we have vetted each other, I follow you on social media. I see new dimensions of you, your wicked sense of humour, your fiery spirit. Your past is illuminated before my eyes. At first I’m a historian, piecing together everything that matters to you. As the months pass, I appear on your grid in photos and comments, woven into the great tapestry of your life. The slow burn of our emotional connection is only beginning. Swiping right didn’t feel as cosmic as eyes meeting across a dance floor or a chance encounter on airplane, but the meet cute is just one chapter of a very long story.
Our online spaces are drenched with relationship advice that treats love like a formula. It’s not an equation to be solved, nor is it written in the stars. It has nothing to do with the fact that you are INTJ and your potential partner is a Scorpio. I watch friends swear away from the apps after too much disappointment. We’re all caught in a vortex of psychoanalysing each other’s behaviour while being simultaneously terrified to catch the disease of feeling something.
I swiped right and left on so many people, both in real life and on screens. All that mattered in the end was that one day I swiped right on you. And after we did, we asked each other: Are you willing to chop wood with me to keep this going? Are you willing to place your body between the wind and the flames to protect this thing?
The one won’t hesitate.
🥰
Beautiful