A Real Story

It was a Tuesday, I remember because I’d just eaten cold pad thai standing over the sink, and I typed ‘dating apps near me’ into Google like it was a search-and-rescue mission. I’d deleted the big-name apps twice already that year. I wasn’t looking for the algorithm’s version of romance, I wanted something that felt smaller, like it might actually know my zip code and not just my continent.

The third result was some app I’d never heard of that leaned hard into proximity — it literally told you how many feet away a match was, which felt either genius or deeply unsettling depending on the hour. I set it up half paying attention, picked bad photos, wrote a bio that just said ‘ask me about my cat, he’s a jerk.’ Within a day I had a match that said 0.1 miles. I assumed it was a bug. It was my downstairs neighbor, the guy with the bike helmet always hanging on his doorknob who I’d nodded at maybe four times in eighteen months of living in the same building.

We met for coffee at the place literally between our two front doors, which took less time to walk to than it took me to decide what to wear. He brought up the time I’d apparently blasted Fleetwood Mac at 11 p.m. on a Sunday and he’d almost knocked on my door to complain but chickened out. I brought up his bike helmet. It was not a cinematic meet-cute, it was two people who’d been near each other for a year and a half finally admitting it out loud.

We’ve been together fourteen months now, and yes, we still live in the same building, just one apartment instead of two. My mom thinks it’s the funniest thing that I needed an app to introduce me to my own neighbor, and honestly, so do I.