Someone once told me that I was a shiny person — a character, of sorts. I didn't believe them, but I knew what they meant. There comes a person, in your life, who will be shiny. They will ask you questions until the sun rises, and you will feel compelled to answer.
I introduced Ken and Alice this year, an endeavor I'd been trying for years. They were, in my eyes, perhaps as compatible as they could be. Alice and I met in Ken's hotel lobby, the air overly perfumed, the flowers overly stiff, and the staff overly polite. He met us by the elevators, and we walked together to a nearby ramen shop. They played nice, taking turns slotting coins into the vending machine, but their shininess stayed guarded. They talked about work, and about the weather, and about living in Tokyo. I kept waiting for the spark, the rock sliding against rock, and it never came. The guard was up, the ramen was lumpy, and they parted ways without exchanging numbers.
—————————
I met Ken in 2020. I lived in my childhood bedroom, and he lived in San Francisco, interning at a rocket company and obsessing over the Fermi Paradox and the paperclip game. He was two years older than me, with curious brown eyes and floppy bangs that I never saw — we were pen pals. He texted with an Android, and we texted long, long threads. It took me about 45 minutes to respond to each pen-pal letter, tapping away on my MacBook. He admitted to me later that he wrote his replies on emails and copy-pasted them to me. We could only call on the weekends; we'd always stay up for the night. Ken had an unplaceable accent, a staccato pattern, and a habit of ending his sentences with an upwards tilt. He once asked me if there was anything I wasn't curious about. I said Russian literature. You? He said nothing.
Three years later, I met Alice. She was a freshman when I was a senior, stuck in the same college club. We went on a retreat to Joshua Tree, and, wine-drunk in the hot tub, she asked me what I hoped. She was beautiful there, black hair shining in the moonlight and hands gesticulating wildly. Alice had trouble sleeping — you could tell by the bags under her eyes. She had a habit of considering her questions carefully, then asking them anyway. Friends tended to get wrapped into long talks with her in the corners of parties. She was serious, but unexpectedly mischievous. I loved her in a way that made me nervous, a vulnerability I hated. Alice was the only friend outside of my year who showed up to my college graduation, holding flowers and wearing her signature dimples.
——————————
I had been convinced they would hit it off, but so much had changed. Ken had been working for a few years, now. It had been years since he had stayed up overnight telling someone his thoughts on the latest movie he'd watched. He hadn't watched a movie in years.
It scared me, how we'd all grown up. Alice is in her last year of school. I had been so certain that they would get along, with the conversations I'd had and the tenderness I felt towards them both. And I was wrong.
For a precious few years, the world is so open. The stars shine, and you can catch the light on your tongue. It is easy, then, to be in love. To stay up until the stars fade. This is the case for a few reasons. First and foremost, you don’t know that many people. You think that everybody is the most special person in the world simply because you’re uncalibrated. And god, what a luxury it is to be uncalibrated. Everybody believes that their first love is different, somehow. That their love was the most unique. But by the second or third time, you understand how the game is played. The God behind the curtain is revealed to be a man.
Alice says it comes and goes in phases. There are times to build or grow or focus or whatever it is, and then there are times to open the window and let people in. Her lopsided smile cheered me. I’ll introduce them again in a few more years.