notes to self, do not send

ok so i keep meaning to write this down before i forget the way it actually felt, because i always forget by morning and then it just sounds like nothing. the thing about talking to strangers online late is that the good questions are never the big ones. nobody wants to be asked what their dreams are at 1am. the questions that worked were dumb. small. almost embarrassing to type.

there was this one person, i forget where i found them honestly, could've been Knot.chat could've been somewhere else, the apps blur after a while. anyway i had been staring at my charger which was halfway out of the wall doing that thing where it charges if you hold it at the exact wrong angle, and i just typed it. like, do you also have one cable in your house that only works if you beg it. and they came back fast, faster than i expected

them: the white one by my bed. i have to put a book on it me: a BOOK them: a specific book it has to be the heavy one

and that was it, that was the whole opening, we were off. no pressure no who-are-you no what-do-you-do. just two people admitting their chargers are held together by superstition. i think thats the trick honestly [is it a trick? feels wrong to call it that]. you ask about the stupid object in front of you and they have the same stupid object.

voice to text is going to butcher this next part because im saying it out loud now lying down. the second person. the second person i remember was around the same kind of hour and i was in the kitchen because i couldnt sleep and the kitchen light does that flicker before it commits to being on, you know the half second where you think the bulbs dead. and i asked them, when your kitchen light flickers do you also stand there bracing for it to die. and they said no my light is fine but my sink makes a noise. THE SINK. and then we spent i swear twenty minutes describing the noises our apartments make. not in a sad way. in a kind of, oh youre haunted by plumbing too, way.

heres where the corrections start because i wrote sink wrong the first time, [it autocorrected to silk?? leaving it], the point is the question was never "tell me about yourself." the question was "does your faucet also clear its throat at night." much easier to answer. nobody has to be impressive about a faucet.

i want to get the third one down before this turns to mush. third stranger. this one i remember best maybe because they were funny in the dry way where you cant tell at first. i think i opened with the laundry one. i have a laundry one i reuse, im not proud, it goes something like: whats the piece of laundry thats been clean and folded and sitting on the chair for so long that its basically furniture now. and people LIGHT UP at this. a lot of rooms have the chair. or the equivalent of the chair.

me: ok be honest. the chair. the laundry chair. you have one them: i have a laundry chair AND a laundry floor me: the floor is advanced them: the floor is where socks go to think

socks go to think. i still think about that. i didnt even ask a follow up i just sat there grinning at my cracked screen, the crack runs right through where the keyboard is so half my typos are genuinely the glass not me [fix this? no leave it, its true].

what im trying to remember is WHY these worked when the normal questions made everyone go quiet. and i think its that they dont ask anyone to perform. asking a stranger their deepest fear is a job interview. asking them whether they also drink the coffee that went cold and stale on the counter rather than make a new cup, thats just, recognition. i did ask that one actually, the coffee one, to the sink person i think, or maybe the charger person, the nights run together. whether they were a re-microwave person or a drink-it-cold-and-sad person or a pour-it-out-pretend-it-didnt-happen person. and that became its own whole conversation, the three types, we were assigning people we knew to the categories.

other ones that landed, im listing them in my head not on the page because i promised myself this would not become a list, just remember them as they come. the one about what mundane thing are you weirdly good at that will never matter. the one about which room in your home is lying to guests about who you really are. oh and asking what the object is on their nightstand right now, just right now, point the camera in your head and tell me, because its always something so specific and human, a half glass of water and a charger (always the charger) and one random receipt.

the receipt thing. i forgot. one of them, the dry one i think, said the only thing on their nightstand was a receipt from weeks ago they kept meaning to throw out and now it had become part of the room. IMPORTANT RECEIPT, apparently. not useful, not sentimental, just still there. i understood that too fast.

the thing i dont want to do here is land it. like end on some clean note about how strangers are really just mirrors or whatever. thats not it. it wasnt deep. it was a charger and a sink and a chair with clothes on it and somebody two timezones away or two streets away, i genuinely never knew, saying socks go to think and me laughing alone at a cracked screen at an hour i shouldnt be awake. thats the whole note. the questions were small on purpose and the smallness is the entire

ok the kitchen light just did the flicker thing again. going to get water. leaving this here unfinished because if i tidy it up tomorrow ill make it sound like advice and its not advice its just what happened, the charger still needs the book on it, i should fix that, [tomorrow]