Keeping note

Left, left, she paused and considered the photo. Right, just. Left, left. Man with a fish and wearing a cap. Cap-fish/ Cat-fish. Double Tinder bonus points bingo. Hard left.
She sipped bitter chocolate foam from her cooling cappuccino. There was cynical, and then the kind of cynical you became after online dating. That was what she told her friends, the still coupled-up ones, with bottomless glasses of wine as she played 40s Divorced Woman TM with stories of weirdos and pervs, “ghosts” and “zombies”. The promising pictures a decade, and two lock-downs, out of date. Damaged Mikes, cheated on Tim’s, man-children and the lovely ones who she wanted to like but just couldn’t imagine waking up to. Bad coffee, worse sex.
Someone had introduced her to this café though. With actual real art and the sort of sofas that the chains didn’t have because they couldn’t sell enough flat whites per square metre if they did. Tim? Matt? No, wasn’t he the Nduja guy? Artisan pizza on the banks of the river. Threatening swans and lava bright oily rivulets meandering down her forearm as she bit in deep. The experienced paddle board guy, Michael. The wide O of his mouth as the water claimed him and not newbie her.
The Book. Mike with the pretentious hair had raved about it. She’d left it artfully angled on her coffee table for date three. A modern classic apparently, now abandoned after he’d ghosted, her will to live lost on page 12. OK, not a win she conceded. But there were wins.
Tinder closed, she opened up Notepad, a naked scrabble board of words. Gizo. Ethan maybe, with his iPhone crisp shots of molten glass sea. La Tania, for the skiing trip she’d always planned, guided by men filled to the brim with advice. Drunken bricks? Colin, bad teeth but they’d gone to an antiques place and she’d fallen for the vase but not the man.
Realization clicked as the names and faces faded. All those swipes, clearing away the old debris of a stale life, leaving new things to try, to see, to go, to smell and to taste. Fresh beginnings.
Maybe, licking the last of the chocolate dust off her teaspoon, she should just cut out the middle man.