We ran out of characters

 The first proper messages arrived while I was out.

I was having one of those extremely rare nights where I had left the house and was attempting to behave like a normal sociable adult.

I was out with my daughter. There was karaoke.

There was also, for reasons I still cannot adequately explain, more than one round of Jägerbombs.

This is not particularly on brand for me.

I am a woman whose usual idea of excess is ordering both a starter and a pudding, but somewhere during the evening I apparently decided that extending our karaoke room booking and drinking shots was an excellent life choice.

It was not.

When I eventually saw his messages the following day, I was less Main Character Mandy™ and more Victorian woman recovering from a mysterious fever.

He had told me I looked nice. He hoped I had a good night.

And then, when he discovered exactly how good a night I had apparently attempted to have, he found the whole thing very funny.

That was important.

He found me funny.

Not performative TikTok me. Not the woman holding a squishy object into a camera trying to sell twelve of them before teatime.

Me.

And so we started talking.

At first it was about the obvious things. TikTok. Toys. Needoh. The strange little online world in which we had met.

Then we became private investigators.

There was a company selling what appeared to be Needoh on TikTok, except something about it didn’t look right.

Naturally, instead of behaving like sensible adults and simply thinking, “Hmm, that seems suspicious,” we decided we were now an unofficial multinational fraud investigation unit.

His contribution to the investigation was particularly subtle.

He attempted to place an order for such an enormous quantity of Needoh that he could only reasonably have been either opening a warehouse or planning to become Britain’s largest private collector of stress balls.

There was absolutely nothing inconspicuous about it.

I cannot remember whether the company blocked him, rejected the order or simply realised that nobody with innocent intentions requires that much Needoh, but our investigation did eventually establish that something was very wrong.

The company turned out not to be legitimate.

There were consequences.

So, technically, Mandy and the Emotional Support Scotsman solved a crime.

This may be overstating our contribution.

I am comfortable with that.

Somewhere in amongst fake Needoh, ridiculous orders and laughing at each other, the conversations got longer.

And longer.

We talked about work. Life. Philosophy. People. Relationships. Things we believed. Things we worried about. Things we found funny.

We would start with one subject and somehow end up six subjects away.

Instagram became increasingly unsuitable for the amount we had to say to each other.

We kept running out of characters.

That should probably have been my first clue.

Some people flirt by sending heart emojis.

Apparently we flirted by exceeding platform limits.

Eventually there was only one reasonable solution.

We moved to WhatsApp.

And looking back now, that feels like the moment something shifted.

Until then, he was still a man who had wandered into my corner of the internet.

Once we moved somewhere quieter, somewhere that belonged less to the audience and more to us, the story changed.

Instagram had introduced us.

WhatsApp was where we began to know each other.

Landed here first? start here