Halfway
There is nobody near you. There is someone two hours away, and a station in between.
The app told you the truth, which you appreciated and resented in equal measure. Within twenty kilometres: nobody new. Within a hundred: four people. One of them wrote to you about the photo of your dog, and three weeks later you are standing on a platform at 9:40 on a Saturday.
You chose the station together on a map, a town neither of you has ever been to, exactly halfway. It has a café in the old waiting room, a bakery, and a river that looked promising in the photos.
On the train you rehearse nothing. You have had three weeks of long messages and two video calls, one of which ran past midnight because their cat walked across the keyboard and sent you a string of Js. You know their laugh. You know they hate coriander. You know they are nervous too, because they told you.
The small-town habits come with you anyway. You did not put your town on your profile. You used photos that are not on your public accounts. You told your sister where you are going, and your sister told you to text her the name of the café, and then sent three hearts.
They are there when the doors open, holding two coffees, one of them with oat milk because you mentioned it once in the second week. They look exactly like the video calls and completely different, the way people do.
You walk by the river, which is as promising as the photos. You talk about how strange it is to live somewhere where you are the only one, and how much less strange it feels to be the only one together.
At four you catch trains in opposite directions. Before yours pulls out, a message arrives: 'Same station in two weeks? I'll bring the dog photos this time.'