11:48pm and the laundry is still there

There is a pile of laundry on the chair. The chair I never sit in, which is the whole reason the laundry lives there. It came out of the dryer warm like three hours ago and now it is room temperature and slightly judgy. I keep looking at it. I am not folding it. I want to be clear that the not-folding is a decision, an active one, I am choosing this. There is one sock on top of the pile that has fallen half off the side like it's trying to escape and honestly same.

So instead I opened one of those random chat sites. You know the kind. Browser tab, cursor blinking in the little box, some stranger somewhere also avoiding their own chair-pile probably.

First one: nothing. Just nothing. I typed "hey" and watched the cursor sit there and then the other person disconnected before I even finished my mug of tea which has gone cold in that specific way where there's a skin on it now. Cold tea skin. I didn't drink it. I just held the mug.

Second one typed back fast which felt promising and then immediately asked me something so personal I actually leaned back from the screen. Like a "what's the worst thing you've ever done" level question, opener, no warmup. I did the thing where you go "haha that's a big one for a tuesday" which is the polite version of the disconnect button. They didn't push. We both knew. I dodged, they let me. Civilized.

Third one decided within two messages that I was a college student. I am not. I have not been a college student for a long enough time that being mistaken for one should feel good and somehow it didn't, it just felt like talking to someone who was talking to a version of me that wasn't there. I corrected it once and then couldn't be bothered to correct it again so I just sort of let them talk to the imaginary student and said "yeah" a couple times and left.

Then I tried putting in an interest. Most of these places let you tag a thing you want to talk about. I put "cooking" because I figured that's broad enough to catch someone. It is too broad. "Cooking" gets you people who want to argue about whether you should salt pasta water (you should) and people who just type "what u cooking 😏" and it's not about cooking. Broad tag, broad nothing. The wider you open the net the more it just fills with water.

So I got specific. Stupidly specific. There was a tag entry box on Knot.chat and I typed in the most oddly exact thing I'd been thinking about all week which is "rice cooker crust" — the crispy stuck layer at the bottom of a cheap rice cooker, the brown sheet of rice that fuses to the metal and you have to chip out with the plastic paddle that came with it. That. I typed that and hit enter half expecting the void.

Got matched in like forty seconds.

And it was — okay it was still a little awkward, these things always are at the start, there was a pause right after the match where neither of us said anything for a beat too long and I almost bailed. But then they typed "wait you mean the GOOD part" and I went oh. Okay. Yes. The good part.

Because here's the thing they knew immediately, no setup needed: the cheap rice cookers, the ten dollar ones with the single button, those are the ones that make the best crust. Crucnhy. (crunchy, I'm not fixing it.) The fancy ones with the fuzzy logic and the eleven settings, they baby the rice, they keep it perfect and soft and they never let it stick, which sounds good but means you never get the sheet. The bad cheap one burns it just enough. We agreed the move is you leave it on "keep warm" an extra twenty, thirty minutes after it clicks off and you don't open the lid, and then there's a layer. They said they add a little sesame oil to the water so it crisps darker. I have never tried that. I'm going to try that.

There was a pause in the middle, a real one, where I think one of us was eating or got distracted, and it sat there for maybe two minutes and it didn't feel like the bad silence from chat number one, it felt like two people in the same kitchen not talking. Then they came back with "ok sorry dog" and we kept going.

We didn't exchange anything. No "add me," nothing. After a while they said "alright im gonna head out, good luck with the crust" and I said "you too" which doesn't even make sense, you too, but they got it, and then the disconnect happened, clean, normal, the way most things should end and almost never do. The box went empty. Cursor back to blinking.

I sat there for a second with the cold mug. The tea skin still floating.

The laundry is still on the chair. The sock is still half off. I'm not going to do the whole pile, I'm not, it's almost midnight. But I reached over and folded the one sock back into its pair and set it on the corner. One thing. That's it. That's the whole pile dealt with as far as tonight is concerned.

Going to bed.