There is a particular kind of boredom that doesn't ask to be entertained — it asks to be useful. I felt that boredom the night the conflict broke out. The world was fracturing in real time, and people were passing around fear like it was currency. Misinformation traveled faster than the truth ever could, as it always does, because lies are lighter.

I couldn't just watch.

So I started sending news into the group chat. Nothing grand — just facts, just clarity, just an attempt to be a small light in a room full of noise. And somewhere in that room, reading what I was sending, was Sara.

I didn't know her name yet. I barely knew her face. But I noticed her the way you notice a particular star before you know its name — not because it's the brightest, but because something in you keeps returning to it.

A friend crush is a strange and underrated thing. It isn't romantic, not yet — it's the quiet recognition that someone exists in the world in a way that makes the world feel more interesting. Sara was that for me. Thoughtful in the way she engaged, present in a way that most people aren't. And I, being the deeply introverted creature that I am, had exactly one bridge to her: the news.

So I built an account on that bridge and walked across it.

On the second of March, 2026, Warmonitor_ was born.

And with it, my excuse.

The message I sent her was not poetry. It was not the carefully constructed opening line of a person who had rehearsed this moment. It was:

Six words between us. And yet I felt them land somewhere deep. There is something quietly devastating about a small moment that means everything to one person and nothing to the other — you can never be sure which side you're on until much later. In that moment, I didn't care. She replied. She was real. And I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time.

Which was strange. Because only running could do that.

A few hours later, she texted me first.

An attachment. News about Bahrain. And then, before I could even process that she had initiated contact, a second message arrived:

There are moments in life that feel like they were written before you arrived. This was one of them. I said yes with an enthusiasm I'm not sure I've matched since, and just like that, Warmonitor_ had two people at its helm.

We were partners. In the only way I had the courage to be.

I slept twenty-three hours in the days that followed. Not consecutively — just in total. The account was burning through me and I didn't care, because the account meant Sara, and Sara meant that the day had a reason to continue.

But I'm self-aware enough to know when a well is running dry. The conversations were becoming repetitive — not for me, never for me — but I could feel the weight of routine beginning to settle over us like dust. And I was terrified of boring her. Of becoming background noise.

So I did what I always do when the world becomes too loud or too quiet: I ran. And I brought her with me, not physically, but in the only way I knew how — by logging my runs on Strava and finding, in those miles, another thread of conversation. Another excuse to exist in her orbit.

It's a little embarrassing, in hindsight. But most honest things are.

I knew it would end. The excuses, I mean. They always do.

One day the conversations simply stopped, the way a song ends mid-lyric — not with a crescendo, but with silence. She stopped replying. And I sat with that silence the way you sit with a door that won't open, turning the handle again and again, wondering what you did wrong.

Then a notification arrived.

I stared at it the way you stare at something you've been waiting for without realizing you were waiting.

There are questions that ask for an answer, and questions that ask for a person. This was the second kind. I said of course, because what else do you say when someone reaches for you across the distance?

She told me about her breakup. I won't say more than that — it isn't my story to tell. But I will say this: being trusted with someone's pain is one of the most intimate things that can happen between two people. It asks nothing of you except your presence. And somehow, she had chosen mine.

I didn't understand it. So I asked.

I have been called many things in my fifteen years on this earth. I have been called driven, quiet, too serious, too in my head. But I have never been called that.

A comforting soul.

I turned the phrase over in my mind like a stone worn smooth by water. What does it mean to comfort someone without trying? To be a place someone lands without knowing you were standing there? I didn't have the answer. But for the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt like I mattered — not for what I could do or produce or prove, but simply for what I was.

We talked for the rest of the day. About everything. About nothing. The conversation moved the way good conversations always do — without destination, without agenda, just two people finding out who the other is.

By the end of it, I knew.

I had feelings for this girl.

I haven't said that word — feelings — about anyone in a long time. Not since my last relationship, which taught me that caring about someone is also a form of risk, and that risk doesn't always pay off the way you hoped.

But here I was again. Standing at the edge of something I couldn't name, looking down at the drop, wondering whether to jump or to step back.

I didn't decide. I just kept walking forward, the way you do when you're not ready to make a choice but the story is already choosing for you.

One afternoon, my phone buzzed.

By this point, that notification had become the best part of my day. Not because of what it usually said — but because of what it meant. That she was thinking of me. That I was somewhere in her day.

She wanted me to flirt with her. Publicly. In front of hundreds of people.

I sat with the absurdity of that for a moment. I, a person who does not flirt — not out of indifference, but out of a complete and total lack of skill — was being asked to perform romance in front of an audience. I told her the truth. I had no idea what I was doing. She said she'd lead.

So I followed.

Context matters. Among those hundreds of people was her ex — a boy who had apparently decided that the best response to heartbreak was to flirt with everyone in sight. She wanted to mirror him. To show him, perhaps, that she was fine. That she had moved on. That she was wanted.

Was I a prop in someone else's story? Maybe.

Did I care?

Reader, I called her princess with all the sincerity I had. Because even if the reason behind it was complicated, the feeling behind it was not. And I have never been very good at pretending otherwise.

Life had found a rhythm by this point — the kind of rhythm that feels so good you become superstitious about it. I ran every day. I talked to Sara after every run. The world was loud and the news was grim and none of it could touch the quiet that settled over me in those hours.

Surely, I thought, this couldn't fall apart.

And then I hopped onto the voice channel.

Sara and Baldie were already there. Sara was making a toasted Nutella sandwich — I remember that detail with a clarity that embarrasses me — and she kept turning away from the camera, her back to us. I was on my phone, half-present, scrolling through headlines out of habit, when I came across it: a residential building in Lebanon, bombed, significant damage.

"Oh my god," I said. Out loud. Without thinking.

Sara had her back to us.

Baldie, apparently, connected two things that were never connected. And whatever he said to Sara in private — I'll never know the exact words — was enough to turn the rest of that call into silence. They ignored me. Both of them. The kind of deliberate, pointed silence that is somehow louder than any argument.

I left the call without saying goodbye.

I ran a 5K. I don't know what my pace was. I wasn't paying attention. I was just running, the way you run when you need the ground beneath your feet to remind you that you're still here, still solid, still real.

When I got back, I saw it.

For a moment — just a moment — I was happy. The way you're happy before you remember what you were worried about.

Then I opened it.

And the rhythm stopped.