User Unknown

Chapter 3: Games

anon~girl: What should I have for breakfast?

He'd started to become part of my regular morning routine as early as day four, messages hastily sent back and forth as I turned on the kettle and threw a teabag in the cleanest cup I could find, still wiping the sleep-gunk from the corners of my tired eyes. There weren't many clean cups in my kitchen, all of them permanently stained from my almost constant tea-drinking habit. My mother always told me to wash a tea-cup properly between every use, but who really had the time for that? I preferred to use the same cup for an entire day before washing it, which explained why all of mine were always so terribly discoloured. 

unknown*user: What are your options?

His message pinged through just moments after mine to him had been delivered it made me smile to think he was actually sat waiting for my words to ping through on his phone, screen open, thread revealed, watching those typing-dots pop up and then down. Sometimes, I'd mess with him: type for a bit, then stop, then start up again a few minutes later, knowing that he'd be watching, frustrated, wondering what I was saying to take so damn long. 

anon~girl: I have Weetabix, that's pretty much it. My bread went green and furry yesterday. I had to throw it out. 

I didn't even need to rummage around in my kitchen cupboards to know what my breakfast choices were. I'd always dreamed of being the kind of woman who had an impressive assortment of breakfast cereals in the cupboard, but the closest I'd ever gotten was having two boxes of cereal open at once, the second purchased and opened after I realised I didn't like the taste of the first. I'd never really gotten the hang of food shopping. I found it boring and tedious, much like other types of shopping.  

unknown*user: That's your answer then, surely? If I were there, I'd make you a great breakfast.

I laughed. It was the fourth morning in a row that we'd had almost the exact same conversation, Weetabix and all. Four days since I'd put a completely anonymous online stranger in charge of my life. It seemed like such an absurd idea when I said it out loud, which I had done, once, to Sarah. I couldn't keep my mouth shut about him any longer; I had to tell someone. Anyone. Just someone. She had quite a lot of opinions about it, but I probably should've seen that coming. 

"Catfish, definitely," she proclaimed, after I'd spent seven minutes trying to explain my weird, new, anonymous situation to her. 

"Maybe. He's nice though. If I'd met him on a dating app, I'd be properly gushing about him right now," I replied, my eyes lowering to avoid making contact with hers. 

"Yeah, but you didn't meet him on a dating app, did you?" 

"Okay, no, you're right, but tell me something: how is THIS any different to meeting some random guy on a dating app?" I scoffed. 

"Ummmm, well, to start with, you've got a photo of the person, and you know their name, and there are other important bits of information on their profile pages."

"You can get catfished even with all of that stuff, though. It happens all the time. Do you not remember the delivery guy who used photos from, like, fifteen years ago?"

"But you don't even know if this guy is single!"

"Wasn't one of your last boyfriends married and lying to you, Sarah? I think I've proved my point here." This time, I deliberately made eye contact with my friend, an indignant look plastered across my face. 

"Fine, but what's up with him wanting to make your decisions for you? Is he paying you to do that? He doesn't even know you. How does he know how to make decisions for you? The more I think about this, the more I think it's actually weird, especially the whole anonymous side. W-e-i-r-d, weird." Sarah waved her hands around as she spoke to me, a bid to show me and not just tell me just how much she couldn't get her head around my situation. To be fair, she'd never been particularly helpful during conversations about my love and sex life, but she had always provided a kind of brutally honest humour about the tales I had to tell and the odd predicaments I seemed to find myself in.