Dear Tinder:
I guess no one would address you in such a formal way. Ridiculous as it may sound, I hope you wouldn’t mind me writing this letter to you. As a matter of fact, I do need some sort of closure.
I can still recall vividly the first time I met you. It was an endless summer in Shanghai. Everything was humid, lush, and youthful. A friend told me about you during a meaningless yet lengthy conversation. I was complaining to him I felt less and less convinced that I would ever fall in love again. I also confided to him the loneliness was eating me out and all I wanted was some companionship. My friend burst out laughing and turned to me with a serious look: “ There is no love anymore, Zoe. But I can introduce you to someone that will fill your emptiness.” That was the moment when you came into my life. Do you still remember, dear Tinder, what a wild ride we had together that summer? I’m still grateful, disregard all the struggles and downturns that we would be confronted with later on, that you brought me into a new, exciting world and taught me to take on an alternative perspective on things. You knew exactly sometimes I could be too emotional, too intense, and too capricious. Yet you indulged me. You said to me gently it was okay because you could change into a new person for me everyday, literally. One day I was lamenting you didn’t have any good taste in music, the next day you were in a band playing guitar; One moment I was fretting you were not romantic enough, the next you spoke soft French to me. We had a lot of fun the entire summer, didn't we? No strings nor worries, as if we were two kids thrown into a sugar jar, and we were tasting all the sweet the world could possibly offer minute by minute.
I thought we were going to part our ways before I came to New York. Both you and I are absolute nonbelievers of long distance relationship. We agreed it would be an amicable ending. Essentially, I was convincing myself it was the right thing to do. However, after a week surviving alone in the city, inevitably I started to miss you. I reached out to you again, and unsurprisingly, you showed up in NYC, because you always knew exactly what I needed and when I needed it. Nevertheless, this time it was different. Maybe I grew out of the initial freshness, or maybe I became tired of knowing the ever-changing version of you, I somehow began to take things seriously when I shouldn’t have. And I know you tried. We both tried. For a moment I thought this might actually turn out fine. I thought after all those times of trying and frustrating and repeating the same story over and over, this might be the chance to settle down for a while, if only you could be stable and consistent. But I keep forgetting this is real life as opposed to cliché movies. In reality, people change; In real life, people are not always so compatible. We were in the beginning because we just wanted the casual, fun, yet we are not on the same page anymore. Eventually, as old habits die hard, you changed your personality without warning, on a cold winter night.
You broke my heart, dear Tinder. I understand now I shouldn’t have trusted you from the beginning. I know now you are and will always be you. No matter what mask you put on, deep down you will never be satisfied with what you had but will always look for what you haven’t had yet. Ironically, that was why I fell for you in the first place, because you know better than anyone that experience matters, that life is being present and living in the moment. But I guess at some point, it is worth putting a little bit of effort in trying to be responsible to myself. Because life is not only now, dear Tinder, life is also tomorrow, and the day after.
So long my almost lover. At least we had the good times.
Love,
Zoe the stranger