Late-Night Random Chat Boundaries

I start most nights around 12:40, sometimes later if I lose track of what I'm doing before that. There's no real reason it's that time except that the apartment has gone still by then and I've usually finished everything I was avoiding. I sit on the floor with my back against the bed because the chair makes my legs fall asleep, and I plug the charger in before I open anything, because the cable is old and the battery drains faster than it should. Twice last week it died at maybe two in the morning and I didn't notice until the screen went black.

The volume stays low. Not for any principled reason — the walls here are thin and I share one with a man who sets an alarm for what must be a 5:15 shift, because every weekday I hear it go off, a flat electronic beeping that runs for almost a full minute before he kills it. So I keep the sound at maybe two notches, enough to hear a voice if someone talks, not enough to carry. I've gotten used to leaning in close.

The door is closed but I don't lock it. Locking it would mean something, and there's nobody here to lock it against. I live alone. It's just that a closed door feels different than an open one when I'm doing this, even with no one around to walk through it.

I keep the camera off most of the time. Some nights I'll turn it on for a minute if the person on the other end seems decent and turns theirs on first, but mostly I leave it dark and just talk, or type, depending on my mood and how tired my hands are. There's a version of me that wishes I were the kind of person who shows their face right away, and there's the actual me, who finds it easier to be honest into a black square.

I use Knot.chat for this. I tried a couple of other things first and they were either full of bots or full of people who wanted one specific thing within ten seconds, and I don't have the energy to filter through that at one in the morning. This one's not perfect but the people are at least mostly people.

There was a guy a few months ago — I think he was in Lisbon, or said he was, I never know how much to believe — who'd just gotten back from his father's funeral and couldn't sleep and didn't want to talk about the funeral at all, wanted to talk about anything else, so we talked about a video game he was playing for almost two hours. I never got his name. I think about that conversation more than I'd expect to. Not because it was profound. It just sat right.

Most of them aren't like that. Most are five minutes of nothing, or someone who's clearly looking for something I'm not offering, and I skip. I skip a lot. One night I was halfway through a sentence — I think I was telling someone about my job, which I never do, so I must have been in a strange mood — and they typed something I didn't even fully read and I just hit skip mid-word. Didn't finish my own thought. Moved on. It felt fine. It usually does.

My eyes get dry around the second hour. I blink and it doesn't help. I keep a glass of water on the floor next to me, the same glass, I refill it from the bathroom tap because the kitchen is further and the floor is cold, and half the time I forget it's there until I knock it with my foot. I've spilled it twice. Not on the laptop, thankfully, but close enough both times that I told myself I'd start putting it further away and never did.

There's no rule about when I stop. Some nights I can feel about twenty minutes ahead of time that it's winding down, that the next person and the one after won't go anywhere, and I'll keep going anyway out of a kind of momentum. Other nights I know to stop sooner. When the conversations all start sounding the same, when I catch myself giving answers I've given before in the exact same words, that's usually the sign that there's nothing left in it for me that night, and continuing past that point just makes me feel worse than when I started. I've learned that the hard way, the staying-too-long, the two-thirty into three-thirty into asking myself why I'm still awake.

When I actually shut it off it's almost always abrupt. Last Tuesday it was 2:54. I remember because I looked at the corner of the screen right as someone disconnected on me mid-sentence, and instead of clicking to find the next person I just stopped. Didn't search again. The clock said 2:54 and I sat there for another minute doing nothing, then unplugged the charger and wrapped the cable around my hand the way I do, and that was it. No big decision. I was just done.

I don't tell anyone I do this. It's not a secret exactly, it's more that it doesn't translate. If I described it out loud it would sound either sad or like I'm up to something, and it's neither. It's a thing I do at night when I can't sleep and don't want to lie in the dark scrolling, which is the only other thing I'd be doing anyway. At least this way there's a chance someone says something I didn't expect.

The neighbor's alarm goes off and I know I've stayed too late. That's the actual clock I run on, more than the one on the screen. When I hear that flat beeping start up through the wall it means it's 5:15 and I am still awake and tomorrow is going to be bad. Most nights I'm long done before then. A few nights I'm not, and I'll be sitting there with dry eyes and an empty glass and the charger still plugged in, and the beeping starts, and I think, okay, that's enough, you actually have to go to bed now.

I usually do, after that. Not always right away. But the alarm makes it real in a way the time on the screen never does, and I close everything and lie down and the man next door starts his day while I'm finally ending mine.