How to Make Friends Online After Moving

The mattress was on the floor because the bed frame was still in two long flat boxes leaning against the wall, and I hadn't found the bag of bolts. There was one lamp, the small one, plugged into the only outlet I'd located behind the couch. The couch wasn't mine. It came with the place, a brown three-seater with a dip in the middle cushion shaped like a previous person. I ate dinner on it. Dinner was crackers and the end of a jar of peanut butter I'd carried in my backpack so it wouldn't get lost in the truck.

Boxes everywhere. I'd labeled some of them "KITCHEN" and some of them "KITCHEN??" and one just had a drawing of a fork on it. The tape gun was lost. I kept the curtains shut because there were no curtains, only a sheet I'd thumbtacked up, and the streetlight outside came through it orange.

It got to that hour where it's not late but it's dark and you've stopped doing the thing you were doing. I'd stopped unpacking around the time I found my chargers. So I sat. The apartment was very quiet in a way that wasn't peaceful, more like the quiet was waiting for me to make a noise first.

I didn't want to call anyone I knew. That sounds bad but it's true. If I called someone from before they'd ask how the move went and I'd have to make it sound like a story with a shape, and it didn't have a shape yet, it was just boxes.

So I opened a random chat thing. Knot.chat. Honestly just to type at somebody. Not to meet a person, more like — you know when you haven't spoken out loud all day and your own voice sounds strange? It was that, but for typing.

The first thing I typed, exact, was:

hi, i just moved and my apartment is 90% cardboard, how's your night

I read it back twice before sending. The "90%" felt like I was trying too hard to be funny. I sent it anyway.

Nothing for a bit. The little dots that mean someone's typing did not appear. I picked at the couch cushion. Then:

lol cardboard era. moving where to?

And here's the thing, I'd already decided in the truck I wasn't going to do the whole map of my life for strangers. So I said:

ha, new city, won't bore you with which one. you?

fair enough. i'm in [redacted by me], cold as hell here

I did not tell them the city. I did not tell them the street, which has a name I still mispronounce in my head. I didn't say the apartment building, which has a number on a brass plate by the door that's missing the middle digit. Didn't mention the cafe on the corner that I could already tell was going to become "my" cafe, the one with the green awning. No store, no name of the little grocery two doors down where I'd bought the crackers. Not the transit stop, not the bus line number, not which way it goes. Nothing about my employer, or a school if school had been the reason, and not the building with the badge readers. Not my live location, which my phone kept politely offering to share with everything.

so what's the first thing you unpack in a new place

realistically? the charger. spiritually? i wanted it to be the coffee maker but i can't find the filters

tragic

i know

There was a pause then. Not a bad one. I heard the upstairs neighbor walk across their floor, three steps and a creak, then a tap running. Pipes in this building announce everything. I'd have to get used to that.

what made you move, if that's not nosy

It was a little nosy but fine.

work mostly. and i think i wanted the version of myself that lives somewhere new

I cringed at that the second I hit send. Too much. It just came out. They were nice about it though:

that's real. i moved two years ago for the same reason and spent the first month eating standing up at the counter

i don't even have a counter cleared yet

respect

I want to be honest that this didn't turn into some great friendship. We talked maybe twenty more minutes. They told me about a show they were watching, I said I'd never seen it, they said I had to, I said I would and I probably won't. That part was easy. Then I asked something about their job and they gave a short answer, and I gave a short answer back, and the dots came and went a couple times without anything arriving, and then a longer gap, and I realized one of us had drifted and it was maybe both of us.

I didn't chase it. I used to do that, send the second message, the "you still there? haha," prop the thing up. I just let it sit. They were a stranger having their own cold night somewhere I'll never know the name of. That was allowed to be the whole thing.

Meanwhile the actual apartment kept interrupting. The fridge, which I'd plugged in that afternoon, finished some internal cycle and shuddered and went quiet, then started a low hum that I would later learn never fully stops. I got up to check it because the shudder scared me. Inside: the peanut butter jar, now empty, that I'd put back in for no reason, and a single bottle of water. The light inside the fridge worked. Small thing but I stood there appreciating that the light worked.

When I sat back down the chat was still open and still just sitting there. I scrolled up and reread my first message, the cardboard one. It wasn't as bad as I'd thought when I sent it.

I opened a different conversation, a new one, with somebody else. Typed:

hey. unpacking. distract me

This one barely went anywhere. Two messages, then they said they were heading to bed, time zones, and that was that. I closed it. No feeling about it really. It's a strange muscle, starting a conversation with no plan and no stakes, and I think the whole point of the night was just doing reps. Type a sentence to a person. See what comes back. Don't manage it.

The bed frame stayed in its boxes. I found the bolts the next morning, by the way, in the box with the fork drawn on it. That night I just dragged the mattress closer to the wall so the orange streetlight through the sheet wasn't directly on my face, and I left my phone on the floor next to me, screen down. The upstairs neighbor ran water one more time. The fridge hummed. Somewhere out there a couple of strangers had typed at me and then gone back to their own boxes, or their own cleared counters, and I didn't know a single true thing about where any of them were, and that was, for one night, completely fine.

I should buy filters.