sporadic attempts to discuss matters of the heart (SAD MOTH ch 1)

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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons, places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

TLDR: This is definitely not about me lol

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Act one begins fall semester, October 2021. Manifestation began in quarantine, spawned from idle thoughts in an empty living room. Sitting in my make-shift living-room-turned-bedroom as my roommate isolated, I considered some items left on my college to-do list. I had already done some classes, attempted some research, went on adventures with friends. Pulling an all-nighter was left unchecked, but seemed massively unappealing. SO really, the next thing to attempt was a college relationship, right? Realistically considering the sample space of people I actually interacted with on a semi-regular basis, I honest-to-god flipped a coin and thus manifested a crush. Let's call them the hedgehog since hedgehogs are cute.

I told you they were adorable.

With any decent rom-com, the meet cute is imperative. Some may say it was inevitable, really. If your brain is working hard enough to manifest a crush, it will definitely be able to do the mental gymnastics to construct the cutest of meets from the most innocent situation.

"You drink water? I drink water! What a coincidence."
Credit: https://xkcd.com/1592/

There is no Austenian ending to these stories, so there is not much to look forward to aside from a vicarious speed run of emotions and retrospectively funny events. I thought I would be fed up with the foolish human construct of love, but James Baldwin convinced me otherwise that love is a decently difficult, if not respectable, endeavor. I guess this is a self evaluation for future reference.

As for the initial condition, I was in that peculiar hazy state of awareness, in which you know of a person's existence, but you aren't entirely sure if they know of yours. Normally, that would induce some sense of sneaky superiority within me, but for the purposes of gaining someone's attention, I had to somehow change that.