The point is, for the first time in my life, I want to walk into that gym tomorrow and let the world see exactly who I am.
I stand at the window for a long time, the city a watercolor, my reflection overlaid like a double exposure.
It’s not pretty. But it’s true.
And that’s enough.
SWIPING
The apartment is louder after dark.
It’s like the city presses all its leftovers, every siren, every argument, every neighbor’s dumb laugh, into the thin drywall just to see if I’ll snap. I’m not special.
There’s a million of these shoebox studios stacked up the hill, each with its own bed, its own ghost, and at least one loser who can’t sleep.
What sets mine apart tonight, the bright red therapy receipt still glowering from the coffee table, the protein shake bottles crowding the sink, the empty bench where I used to keep a second chair for company.
I haven’t turned on a light.
It’s just the blue of my phone, the blinking from the old router, and whatever sodium vapor creeps in through the window blinds. If you were to break in right now, you’d think the place was abandoned.
You’d look for a body, maybe, or at least a note.
But there’s no note.
Just me, alive, on the floor in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt I don’t remember putting on, back pressed to the fridge because the cold is better than thinking.
I’m supposed to be processing, is what Dr. Sharma says.
Instead, I keep replaying the moment the group chat lit up, the way Caleb’s name sat on my tongue like a pill I couldn’t swallow.
I think about the funeral, how I hugged him too hard, how I told him I was there for him, how I let my own brain convince me that people can only grieve in one direction.
I don’t even want to know what that says about me.
What I do want is to shut it off. All of it, the noise, the thinking, the shitty parade of “what comes next” that keeps lapping my brain.
So, I do what you do, I look for a button. The nuclear option.
The thing I can press and let the world move for a minute without me being part of it.
My phone’s already in my hand.
The thumbprint scanner is so worn it’s basically tattooed with my DNA. I scroll through my apps, past the ESPN and the banking and the camera roll full of pictures I never post.
I find the Tinder icon, half-buried on the second page, next to Grindr, which I have never, not once, opened sober.
I stare at the screen.
The last time I used Tinder was months ago. Even then, I never messaged, just matched and unmatched, like a nervous tic.
But tonight, I can’t shake the sense that I’m being watched, judged, by the three empty bottles on the counter and the city outside.
Fuck it.
I press and hold, wait for the logo to pop open, and immediately regret it.
The first thing I see is my own face, warped by the selfie cam, eyes so bloodshot it looks like I’ve been in a bare-knuckle fight.
