A Real Story

My roommate had a rule: if the countdown timer hit under an hour, you had to message or let it die, no exceptions, because apparently I’d let eleven matches expire in silence that month alone. So at 11:04 p.m. with fifty-nine minutes on the clock, I looked at his third photo — a guy holding a bass the size of a forearm, grinning like he’d wrestled it — and typed, ‘that fish looks personally insulted by you.’ He wrote back in four minutes flat: ‘my cousin caught it, I just held it for the photo, I’ve never fished in my life.’ I respected that honesty more than I expected to.

We talked for three days about nothing important — his terrible taste in podcasts, my inability to keep a plant alive past February — before he suggested coffee at a place near the aquarium, which felt like a bit, and he confirmed it was, because he wanted to see if I’d actually show up given the fish thing. I did. He ordered a drink with too much syrup in it and apologized for it unprompted, which I found weirdly charming.

We’ve been doing a standing Sunday pancake thing for almost two years now, and he still brings up that expiring match timer like I was one text away from ruining his life without knowing it. Honestly, the algorithm did its one good deed for the year forcing my hand that night, because left to my own devices I definitely would’ve let him expire like the other eleven.