I know a place with no entrance, no floor or tables or bar, just a procession of people that I never knew existed. I make my way down the line, discovering faces and quickly passing them by — always moving forward, moving on. They’re road signs along a highway. Blips on a heart monitor. A metronome for modern love.

Intermittently someone catches my eye — a connection. Everything goes dark. My heart skips a beat.

The moment is fleeting but might happen again, several times with several people. Then silence. Are they waiting? Should I say something? You miss 100% of the memories you never make. I enthusiastically talk to many people at once. I develop a rhythm, I get confident, I give complements, I make jokes. I observe strange themes: face paint, finger moustaches, drugged tigers, Native American headdresses.

Conversations start and stop. They’re not really interested, or I’m not really interested, or I say something stupid, or someone gets bored. It’s a simple truth that people are generally boring, myself included. I wrote this blog post.

Or maybe the conversation goes well, and I get a number. Success! I’ve reached a new level.

But meeting is difficult, because people are busy. We set something up two weeks from today, or sometime next month, or not at all. I may never see them again. Or we meet for a drink and everything is unfamiliar: their face, their voice, their personality, their laugh. I thought we’d hit it off more. They thought I’d be taller.

They’re more familiar in the place I know, within the confines of the screen on my phone, where I impulsively flip through them like the pages of a magazine. Intermittently, someone catches my eye — a connection. I send them a message and they reply, or they’re not really interested, or I’m not really interested. We keep moving forward, moving on.