Everyone said, “You two should just date.”

The deepest cut wasn’t being rejected. It was being forgettable .

There’s an existential loneliness to swiping through a hundred faces, knowing you’re also just a face being swiped past. It forces a question that hurts: Am I even a character in my own story anymore, or just background noise in someone else’s feed? By my mid-twenties, I had stopped trying to engineer romance. Not because I was wise. Because I was tired.

That “almost” was a phantom limb. I felt it long after it was gone.