A Real Story

I was 41, freshly out of a marriage, and it was one of those nights where I couldn’t sleep so I just started typing things into my phone. ‘Meet singles near me’ felt embarrassing even to search, but I did it anyway, sitting on my kitchen floor at 1 a.m. because the chair felt too formal for what I was doing. Most of what came up was app download pages, but buried on the second page was a local Meetup group, twelve members, that did Sunday hikes at a state park twenty minutes from my house.

I almost didn’t go. I told myself I’d just check it out from the parking lot and leave if it looked weird. There were seven people there that first Sunday, and one guy, D., showed up in basketball shoes for a trail that was mostly mud from three days of rain. He slid twice in the first mile and laughed about it both times instead of getting embarrassed, which is somehow the thing I remember most clearly.

We ended up walking near the back of the group together mostly because we were both too slow for the front pack. He asked if I wanted to grab coffee after, not dinner, just coffee, which felt low-stakes enough that I said yes without overthinking it. We talked for two hours in a gas station coffee shop because it was the only thing open near the trailhead.

It’s been a little over a year now. We still do that same hike on the anniversary of the muddy one, and he still refuses to buy real hiking shoes, which I’ve stopped fighting him on. What actually worked wasn’t some algorithm — it was just looking for something happening in real life, close enough that showing up wasn’t a whole production.