We Fell In Love Before We Met

August — Eight Months Before The night Alex stopped sleeping had nothing to do with insomnia. It started the way most things started in his life — quietly, without announcement, without the dramatic pivot he might have experienced if someone had told him in advance that this was the night everything changed. It was a Tuesday. He had a half-finished essay on his laptop, a cold cup of instant ramen on his desk, and three notifications from a group chat he'd been muting for six days straight. He was twenty years old and felt, in the particular way that only twenty-year-olds can feel, that nothing interesting would ever happen to him again. His dorm room at Harwick University was a single — something his mother had paid extra for, citing his "need for quiet," which was a polite way of saying she'd noticed he wasn't good at people. Room 214, Aldermoor Hall. Seven feet by eleven. A bed shoved against one wall, a desk against the other, a window that faced the parking lot and let in the orange glow of a single sodium lamp every night like a vigil candle. He'd been sitting at that desk for four hours. The essay was about the ethics of surveillance in contemporary fiction — Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Circle, a third book he'd read once and was now half-remembering. He had written two paragraphs and deleted one of them. The cursor blinked at him with what he had come to understand as contempt. At 11:47 p.m. he opened his phone, not because he expected anything but because he always opened his phone when he didn't know what else to do with his hands. He had forty-three apps and used four of them. He opened the fifth one by accident — an anonymous chat platform called Night Line that Kyle had installed on his phone six weeks ago as a joke, during one of their late-night study sessions. "You need to talk to someone who isn't us," Kyle had said, grinning, already a little drunk on coffee and bad decisions. "Someone who doesn't know about the time you cried at that nature documentary." "I didn't cry," Alex had said. "I was moved." "Bro, you sobbed." He'd never actually opened the app. The interface was plain — almost aggressively so, like it had been designed by someone who distrusted beauty. Dark background, white text, a prompt that said: SAY SOMETHING. START ANYWHERE. There were no profile pictures. No usernames until you chose them. No way to trace a conversation back to a real person. He almost closed it. Instead, not knowing why, he typed: Does anyone actually use this thing or is it just me and the bots? He didn't expect an answer. He was about to set the phone down when the response came — immediate, almost like she'd been waiting. The bots have better grammar than you'd think. But yes, actual human here. Couldn't sleep? He stared at the screen. Then he typed back: Essay due Thursday that I haven't started. You? The reply took a little longer this time. Not long enough to feel deliberate, but long enough to feel human. Can't sleep. The usual reasons. He didn't ask what the usual reasons were. It felt rude, somehow, in a way that it wouldn't have if they'd been sitting across from each other. There was a different texture to typed words in the dark — they felt more fragile, more honest. He wrote: I'm Alex. You don't have to tell me your name. A pause. Then: I like Luna. You can call me that. He didn't know why the word settled in his chest the way it did. Just a screen name. Probably not her real name. It didn't matter. He typed: Okay. Luna. And that was how it started. They talked until 3 a.m. About nothing, mostly. About the essay he wasn't writing, about a book she'd read that he hadn't, about whether instant ramen counted as cooking or as an act of quiet self-destruction. She was funny in the way that caught him off guard — not performing humor, not reaching for it, just letting it arrive sideways in sentences that he'd read twice because the first reading always caught him flat-footed. She had opinions about things. Strong ones. She thought the ending of a certain very famous novel was a cop-out. She had a theory about why coffee tasted better before noon. She believed, genuinely and without irony, that the best conversations happened after midnight because something about exhaustion stripped away the social performance people usually wore over their real selves. He found himself agreeing. He also found himself noticing, somewhere around 2 a.m., that he hadn't thought about the essay once. When he finally said he should sleep, she said: You probably should. What's the essay on, anyway? Surveillance. Privacy. Whether watching someone without their knowledge changes them. That's a good question, she wrote. I'll think about it. He almost asked what she meant. Instead, he typed: Same time tomorrow? The pause before her response was the longest one yet. Then: Maybe. Goodnight, Alex. He set the phone down. The essay was still unwritten. Outside, the sodium lamp threw its orange light across the parking lot, and somewhere in the building a door closed softly, and Alex sat in his dorm room and felt, for the first time in what seemed like years, that the night had been generous with him. He did not sleep for a long time. But it wasn't insomnia. It was something else. Something that felt, cautiously, like the beginning of something. • • • He finished the essay the next morning in two hours. He got an A-. He didn't tell anyone about Luna. It felt like something he needed to keep close for a little while — the way you cup a small flame in your hands not because you're hiding it but because you're afraid the wind will take it before it's had time to grow. That evening, at 11:30 p.m., he opened Night Line. She was already there. You actually came back, she wrote. I said I would. No, she replied. You said "maybe." He smiled at his phone in the dark. He typed: That was you. A pause. Then: Oh. You're right. Sorry. And they talked again. And the night passed the way good nights do — too quickly, and without enough of them left to waste.