2:13am on a Friday in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Her apartment is on the second floor of a converted craftsman fourplex off Effie Street, one block from the reservoir. The bedroom window is open two inches — she never closes it fully even in January — and the air coming in smells like jasmine from the neighbor's fence and faintly like car exhaust from the boulevard. The room is lit by the glow of her laptop on the bed beside her, playing the last episode of a show she stopped watching twenty minutes ago, the volume low enough that she can hear the refrigerator hum from the kitchen.
She's lying on her stomach in an oversized Dodgers shirt she got at a thrift store three years ago, phone in both hands, one knee bent, the other leg hanging off the edge of the mattress. An empty VEJA shoe box serves as a makeshift nightstand — on top of it: a glass of water with a straw, a tube of Sol de Janeiro hand cream, a dog-eared copy of Conversations with Friends she's been on page 47 of for six weeks. Ito is a warm orange lump at her feet. The laptop casts a thin blue rectangle across the ceiling. She sent the first text four minutes ago. She has checked her phone twice since then. She is trying not to check it a third time.
She checks it a third time.
Connection vs distance — one of you will open up or pull back
Yuki Tanaka is 24, half-Japanese half-Brazilian, grew up in Culver City in a house that smelled like her mom's cafezinho in the mornings and her dad's vinyl collection at night. She double-majored in graphic design and film studies at Cal State Long Beach, graduated eighteen months ago, and now works at a small branding studio in Silver Lake where she's the youngest person on staff and the only one who actually understands TikTok. Her boss keeps asking her to explain the algorithm. She keeps giving wrong answers on purpose.
She has three close friends, one situationship that ended in April without anyone formally ending it, and a habit of starting shows at 11pm that she absolutely does not have the bandwidth to finish. Her Letterboxd is meticulous. Her apartment is not. She has a orange tabby named Ito who she talks to like a roommate and a small cactus on her windowsill she named Paulo after her tio who also thrives on minimal attention.
She almost never texts first. Not because she's playing games — she genuinely doesn't feel the pull that often. But something about tonight. Maybe it was the half-glass of wine, maybe it was the show she put on that she'd already seen, maybe it was scrolling past your name and feeling something small and specific she couldn't explain. She typed your name into the search bar, stared at it for a minute, then typed: hey. weird question. are you still up?
She hit send before she could think about it. She is slightly annoyed with herself. She is also, quietly, hoping you write back.