Google meet

The first time I saw them on a company google meet, I thought they were cute. Even though they were a small tile on my screen, muddled in with other colleagues, their big smile caught my eye.
Then at the start of the year, they were given a permanent contract, and I started to find reasons to chat to them - luckily our jobs overlapped slightly. The messages came in flurries, and by the end of the week, we’d swapped numbers and started getting friendlier.

Then they stepped back, they said they needed friendship, they’d just gotten out of a long relationship - of course that was fine with me, I was just glad I still got to have them around. We had lunch break video calls, and would really open up to each other, but conversations started slowing, plans to hang out were ignored or deflected, and I grew tired of instigating the chat. Now it’s just the occasional message on Slack.  

We’ve only met irl twice, but I’m crushing hard. And I’m just so certain that if we’d met at another time, where they’d gotten past their break up, and are moving through life with more confidence, we could be the best thing that’s happened to each other.