A Real Story

His third photo on Hinge was a screech owl perched on his forearm, wing bandaged, and the caption said something like ‘volunteering keeps me humane.’ I only swiped right because I recognized the enclosure behind him — it was the raptor building at the wildlife rehab center where I’d logged Tuesday shifts for two years. We matched on a Thursday night in March, and I opened with ‘that’s Delphine, she came in with a fractured wing in January,’ just to see if he’d catch that I knew the bird by name.

He wrote back within ten minutes, stunned, asking how I knew her. Turns out he’d started volunteering the same month I’d had to cut back my hours because of a work move, and he’d basically taken over my old shift without either of us ever meeting in person — different days, same clipboard, same feeding schedule I’d built. We spent our first date at a coffee shop two blocks from the center comparing notes on which hawks hated the scale and which volunteers always left the enclosure door unlatched.

We’ve been together fourteen months now, and Delphine was eventually released back into the wild that June — we went to watch, standing on opposite sides of the release box like it was some kind of anniversary neither of us had planned. It’s a strange thing, matching with someone because of a photo of a bird, then realizing you’d been circling each other’s lives for months without knowing it.