The Tuesday I Almost Closed the Tab

My thumb was already on the little x. I had the cursor over it, the close button, and I was maybe a second from clicking when the camera preview loaded and I saw myself and thought, no. Not like this.

The preview was bad. I don't know how else to say it. The light from the window was behind me so my face was this gray smudge and the top of my head had a sort of halo from the lamp, and I leaned in to check and that only made it worse, my nose got huge. I have a face that does not do well leaning into a webcam. I sat back. Sat back a little more. It didn't help much but it helped.

The desk didn't help either. There was a coffee cup right at the bottom of the frame, an old one, the inside ringed brown because I'd been drinking out of it for two days without washing it, and behind that a charging cable that goes nowhere now, it just lives on the desk, coiled, plugged into nothing. I moved the cup. Then I picked it up and moved it back because moving it just put it somewhere else in the shot. There were also papers, a receipt, a pen with the cap chewed. Outside my room or maybe down the hall somebody had the TV on and I could hear it, not the words, just the up and down of it, the murmur and then a laugh track and then murmur again.

So that's where I was. Bad light, dirty cup, cable to nothing, TV through the wall, and a stranger's video loading on the other half of the screen.

I want to be honest that I didn't go in confident. I'd opened Knot.chat kind of as a dare to myself, a thing to do because I was bored and it was a Tuesday and Tuesdays are long, and I had told myself I'd just look, just see who's even on these things, and now there was a person there and I had to say something and my hands didn't want to.

I typed hey. Looked at it. Deleted it. Too small, hey, it just sits there.

I typed something longer then, something like "hi sorry my camera is being weird tonight," and I read it back and it sounded like an apology before anything had even happened, like I was already saying sorry for existing on the screen, so I deleted that too. Backspace held down till the box was empty again.

What I sent in the end was just: where are you watching that from. Because I could hear, faintly, that they had something playing too, or I thought I could, there was a flicker of light on their face that wasn't a screen-glow exactly. Plain line. I hit enter before I could change it.

Then nothing.

The reply didn't come. I watched the little area where text shows up and it stayed empty and I had that drop in my stomach, that fast one, where you've said a weird thing to a stranger and now you get to sit in it. The TV laughed through the wall. I moved the cup again. I genuinely considered closing the tab a second time, my thumb went back toward the corner, and I had the whole thing planned, I'd just close it and go wash the cup and that would be the night.

And then they answered.

It wasn't even that good of an answer. They typed back that it was just a show on in the background, nothing, they weren't really watching, and then they said it out loud too, they unmuted and there was a voice, and the voice was so normal, that's the thing I keep coming back to, it was just a regular tired voice like mine, and the second there was a voice instead of a blinking box the whole thing went normal. Just like that. The bad light didn't matter. The cup didn't matter.

We talked for a while. I don't want to make it sound like more than it was. They were on a laptop in a kitchen, I could see a bit of a cupboard behind them and a calendar on the wall that was still turned to the wrong month, and we talked about that, about how nobody ever flips the calendar, how it just stays on March until July. They had the same coffee-cup situation, more or less, they held theirs up to show me and it was worse than mine, which made me feel better, and I held mine up, the brown-ringed one, and we did that for a second, two people holding up dirty cups to webcams.

I told them about the cable that goes nowhere. They didn't really get why that was funny but I thought it was funny. We talked about the weather where they were, which was raining, and the weather where I was, which was not, and how it's strange when two places are having different weather at the same exact minute even though obviously that's how weather works. They yawned at one point and apologized and I said I was tired too. The TV kept going through my wall the whole time and at some point I stopped hearing it.

It was just ordinary. Two people, late, in two kitchens or near two kitchens, saying small things. There wasn't a big moment. Nobody said anything that I'm going to remember word for word. It was the kind of talk you have and then it's gone, which is fine, which is most talk, honestly.

And then it sort of wound down the way those do, the gaps got a little longer, and they said they should probably go and I said yeah me too, and that was true, it was late. We didn't trade anything. No name, no handle, nowhere to find each other after. I didn't ask and they didn't ask and I think we both understood it the same way, that it was a Tuesday thing, a one-time thing, and that asking would've made it into something it wasn't.

So they waved, an actual little wave at the camera, and I waved back, and the window closed, and then it was just me again at the desk with the gray light and the cup and the cable and the TV still going faintly through the wall. I washed the cup after. Finally washed the cup.