What to Do After an Awkward Random Chat

I made it weird by typing "haha that's so real" to someone who had just told me their dog died. Not real-real, I don't think — the way people say a thing on a random chat where you can't tell if anyone means anything. But still. The word "haha" sat there on my screen and I looked at it and there was no way to un-send it that wouldn't be worse, so I did nothing, and then the other person typed "ok" and that was the whole rest of the conversation. One "ok." They left.

I had a pretzel in my other hand the entire time. One of the big soft ones from the bag in the freezer that you microwave, which makes them not really pretzels anymore, more like bread shaped like a pretzel, chewy in the wrong way. I'd eaten about half of it before the dog thing came up and then I just held the other half and didn't eat it, which is a strange thing to notice about yourself but there it is.

I closed the tab. Not dramatically. I just clicked the little x and the window went back to the regular desktop with the folders I never open and the picture of a lake that came with the computer. I don't know what lake. It's been there for years.

Then I got up for water. I keep a glass by the sink that I rinse instead of replace, so it has that slightly filmy thing glasses get, and I filled it from the tap and drank the whole thing standing up looking at nothing. The kitchen light has been buzzing for a couple weeks, very faint, only when it's quiet. It was quiet. So I could hear it.

And the thing is once I sat back down I started doing the replay. You know the replay. Where you go back over it like you can find the exact second it went bad and fix it from the outside. They said the dog had been sick for a while. They said it was old, fourteen. They said the name but I genuinely cannot remember the name now, which bothers me more than it should, because at the time it felt important, a real dog with a real name, and I typed "haha that's so real." I think I'd been laughing at something two messages up, somebody's thing about their roommate, and I had the laughing still going in my hands and it just landed on the wrong message. That's the most likely explanation. It doesn't help to have the explanation.

I replayed it maybe four times and somewhere in there I got annoyed. Not at the other person. At the replay. My brain kept running the clip like there was another version tucked behind it somewhere. There wasn't. The dog is still dead and I still said haha. Going over it a fifth time doesn't add information. I know this and I did it anyway and got irritated at the doing, which is its own little loop, irritation about the irritation, very efficient, no output.

At some point I opened the message box on a new one, a blank one, and started typing in it even though there was nobody there yet, just to have somewhere to put my hands. What I typed was "you always do this, you can't even talk to a stranger without." I didn't finish it; I deleted it. The cursor just blinked in the empty box.

I should mention these are random chat things, where you click and get put with whoever. I'd been using Knot.chat for a couple weeks, on and off, mostly late. It's fine. It's the kind of fine where you keep opening it.

Anyway after I deleted the sentence I sat there and decided, very practically, like it was a real plan, that next time I'd just open with something shorter. My openers are too long, I think. I have this habit of typing a whole paragraph to start, a little hello plus a question plus a joke, trying to give the other person three different doors to walk through so one of them works, and it comes off as a lot. Maybe it comes off as a lot. I don't actually know how it comes off, that's the problem, you never get the report card. But shorter feels right. "hey" or "hi" and then wait. Let them carry some of it. That was the decision. Shorter next time.

I don't know why I think a shorter opener would have stopped me from typing haha at a dead dog. It wouldn't have. The opener wasn't the problem. But the brain wants a thing to fix and the opener is fixable, you can just type fewer words, so it offered me that instead of the actual thing, which isn't really fixable, which is just that I'm sometimes a half-second behind in conversations and the half-second lands wherever it lands.

The pretzel was cold now and the salt had gone soft and translucent the way it does. I ate it anyway. There was a piece of it stuck to the plate, the bottom, where the bread had sweated onto the ceramic, and I had to sort of peel it. I drank more water but from the same glass, didn't refill, just tipped the last bit that was left and it was warm from sitting.

The chat was still open behind everything, the program I mean, the little icon down at the bottom waiting. I could click it again and get put with someone new, somebody who doesn't know about the dog or the haha, a clean person. I thought about it. I didn't do it yet. The light kept buzzing. I picked up the empty glass and turned it around in my hand once and put it back down on the table, not the sink, the table, where it'll sit until tomorrow.