It was a perfectly average day in a perfectly average town on a perfectly average street in the middle of suburban Iowa, and Matilda was chowing down on a bowl of Easy Mac. Her cats, Rupert, Murdoch, and Mittens, were curled up beside her, and she was nosing around on social media for inspiration for a new crochet project. She had medium brown hair, brown glasses, and wore a lot of purple.
Being an introvert with few real life friends to speak of, Matilda spent most of her time online.
What did she do there? She clicked around on social media, laugh reacted to memes, and occasionally pumped out a well-written response to someone’s intentionally inflammatory political post.
There was, of course, one very small problem with all this.
Matilda was 35 years old, and “single by choice.”
Her cats were nice. Her crochet kept her busy. But deep down, she was terribly lonely. She had very little idea how to meet anyone, or how to have any sort of normal relationship with anyone she did meet.
Which is why meeting Norman sent her into a verifiable panic.
It happened late one night—a random friend request.
Suspicious.
She found these requests sketchy at best. She almost always deleted outright.
But, well, something about this one had caught her eye. This one had seemed nice. He had a cute smile, and friendly eyes. “Norman,” she had whispered to herself, rolling his name around on her tongue.
She had hesitantly hit “accept,” and hoped she wouldn’t regret it.
Norman, as it turned out, was not creepy at all, but a rather upbeat person who laughy faced all of her memes.
Oh, the joy! Neither of them was very talkative, and they fit together like puzzle pieces, if a dank meme were printed out and cut into puzzle pieces. Matilda enjoyed the constant positive affirmation, and Norman enjoyed her memes so much that one day, he up and messaged her.
Matilda froze.
Sniffing, she tiptoed to her inbox, and read his message. What horrors might come from this void of the unknown, she had no idea.
Much to her relief, the message was simple:
“Omg!” he wrote. “Your meme was hilarious! Where did you even find it?”
And so a fledgling friendship was born.
Though Matilda was hesitant at first, she found herself quickly opening up to Norman. He was funny, sensitive, and also had a soft spot for felines. She would be the first to admit that their conversation mostly focused on celebrating funny memes, but well, she didn’t have anyone else she talked to on a regular basis, and Norman quickly became a friendly face. They both kept odd hours and were often up long after midnight, and it became nice to see his texts at all hours of the day and night, and know he was someone she didn’t have to explain her odd sleep patterns to.
It was a beautiful, simple relationship, filled with giggles, puns, and cat memes, and it lasted a whole three months before it all came crashing down.
What, you ask, could’ve happened to have torn poor Matilda and Norman apart?
As per usual, it was a random piece on celebrity fashion—you know. Click bait. It contained a lot of judgment on one poor scantily-clad celebrity.
Said celebrity was rather well known for wearing very little clothing. It was her thing, and Hollywood celebrated her for it. She got a kick out of doing interviews wearing almost nothing, which of course boosted that station’s ratings, and in so doing, boosted her popularity as well. After all, the only thing more popular than a well-beloved star is a well-hated one.
Unfortunately, in the comment section of one of these posts, Norman had made a comment that was a little untoward. “You shouldn’t wear something like that if you can’t pull it off.” Also unfortunately, because he was by now Matilda’s number one friend on the internet, it was the first and only comment she saw on the post.
And Matilda…well, Matilda was hurt. She had quickly projected her own feelings onto the woman, and imagined that she must be very self-conscious about her weight, and that Norman’s comment must’ve hurt her very much. And so she began to get upset at her new friend.
Not having any social or communication skills to speak of, Matilda strongly felt that the best reaction to this complete social catastrophe would be to simply stop talking to Norman. No matter that the celebrity in question did, in fact, look horrible in the outfit she had chosen to wear, and no matter that under different circumstances, she would have texted Norman about it and laughed long and hard over the ridiculous looking dress.
No, this was different. Matilda didn’t know how to deal with any sort of rejection. It is a well-known fact that projecting one’s issues onto a celebrity, and feeling as though their trolls are your own critics, is the worst kind of rejection.
Knowing that she had to take a strong stance and be true to her own morals and values, Matilda took a risk. She decided to teach Norman a lesson by ghosting him for the evening.
That’s right—all night long, no matter what happened, no matter what memes he sent her or how confused he was, Matilda resolved that she would not text him or acknowledge him at all.
She was determined to commit to this, and felt strongly that by succeeding in her goal, she would fix something in the universe that had heretofore been broken, and thereby make herself a better person, and the world, a better place.
**Do you love it? You can buy the book on my website, https://krislynlyon.com, or on Amazon!**
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