One Week Before

My middle-school crush added me on Facebook about a week before getting married.

A month later, the marriage ended.

Years passed.

Before another wedding, her Instagram account became public.

I noticed the timing immediately.

There was no rational reason to connect these things. A friend request does not cause a divorce, and changing an Instagram setting does not predict the future of a marriage. The comedy belonged entirely to me, because once the brain sees a pattern, it becomes very difficult to leave it alone.

Middle-school crushes occupy a strange place in memory. They may have had almost no role in adult life, yet a name can still bring back a much younger version of yourself. Before social media, such people could disappear completely. Now they can return through a notification, a suggested contact, or a profile that suddenly becomes visible.

That creates a peculiar relationship with the past. You may know that someone married, moved, divorced, or changed jobs without actually knowing the person anymore. The information remains current while the relationship belongs to another century of your life.

So when the Instagram account became public before the second wedding, I did what any completely rational observer would do.

I waited.

Not for a message. Not for a meeting.

For the universe to complete a joke.

Two weeks passed.

The original note ended there, and that is where this one should end too. Whatever happened afterward belongs to her life, not to the pattern my memory wanted to invent.

What remains is smaller and funnier: one old crush, two weddings, two social-media events, and a narrator staring at coincidence as if coincidence had a plan.