The Building I Walk Past

October 27th. I opened the app because it was a Tuesday and I had coffee and no particular plan for the next twenty minutes. That is the honest reason. Not hope, exactly, more like the domestic version of a coin flip. I have opened it four or five times in the past year, the way you check a browser tab you know hasn't changed, and usually I close it again feeling neither better nor worse.

This morning there was a match. That is not in itself remarkable, the app will produce a match the way the kitchen window will produce morning light, which is to say reliably and without ceremony. What stopped me was the location listed under his profile: a cross-street I recognize because I pass it every Tuesday morning on the way to the climbing session. A building I have walked past, I would estimate, forty or fifty times. Which means I have been in the general vicinity of this person repeatedly, in the least narratable way possible, just walking past a building, just minding the corner.

The face of someone doing quiet arithmetic about whether this is a good idea

I have not done anything yet. I am aware that is a sentence I write with some frequency. The prints are still leaning against the kitchen wall. Gerald has a new leaf I have not written about. The draft folder has a sentence about something I noticed on the walk last week. Everything in the apartment is in its honest not-yet state, and now there is this too, a name, a cross-street, a small flicker of something that might be curiosity or might just be the October light doing what it does to a Tuesday morning.

The windowsill, the prints, Gerald, and apparently now this

I left the app open when I set my phone down. That is probably the most I am prepared to say about what I intend to do.