The Notification You Were Not Expecting
It sits there in the "Requests" folder, not even in your main inbox, because Instagram knew before you did that this one needed a buffer. His name. His face, slightly older in the profile picture, maybe a new haircut. A follow request from the person you spent two years trying to stop thinking about, and then, eventually, did. Or thought you did. The fact that your stomach did something just now, that small, specific lurch, is the first piece of information worth paying attention to, and it has nothing to do with him.
