Austen

by Quinn Mason

Before I met you, there was Austen. I never brought him up before because I’m one of those people who likes to compartmentalize; it’s why I keep the nutritional yeast and other health food in the pantry and hide the Ruffles and Nerds in the cupboard above the stove. There was overlap between the two of you. He was the reason you asked me to put my phone away when we met at the waffle stand for our first offline date. And the answer to your late-night questions when I started staying over, my back curled away from you, my face lit by my iPhone even with the brightness turned to low. What are you doing? Who are you talking to? Why are you still on your phone? In the early days of our relationship, you lacked the authority to demand more from me without coming off as controlling. And by the time you’d gained the right to that know- ledge, there was no longer anything for you to know.
Austen came into my life during a “dark time.” I was living in the Plateau apartment I’d shared with my two best friends for four years—except both friends had recently moved to different cities for reasons related to “career growth,” their rooms taken by girls who resembled their four-years-younger selves. It was one of those shabby and sumptuous apartments with high ceilings and the hint of crown mouldings underneath dozens of layers of paint. There was a storage room in the back filled with the detritus of former tenants—a boxy ’80s television with a built-in VHS deck; a red rubber devil’s mask and accompanying trident; a Victorian-looking fur-collared coat—and there was a separate room that housed the toilet and had a window that looked on to the shower. It was the kind of Montreal apartment I’d wanted to live in since I first moved to the city: perfect for hosting parties, lease-transferred from person to person so the rent remained dirt cheap, and it continued to accrue a sense of ruined wealth. But my friends had moved on to adulthood, a place where the lengthening of a LinkedIn profile is worth the hassle of uprooting your life, and I could sense that their early-twenties facsimiles were waiting for me to also move out.
But move out to where? Another shared apartment, with a newer kitchen and recessed lighting? An apartment filled with young professionals who kept the fridge clean and offered their guests fancy cocktails when they hosted “intimate” 5à7s? I was (and still am) broke. The candle store I worked in paid little but offered a lot in the way of work/life balance, which was a bonus when I still had a life. I didn’t want to pay more to live with strangers because of my birth year—and anyway, I was younger than my two best friends by six months and eight months respectively; shouldn’t that mean I still had time?
My two new roommates were talking about Tinder in the living room one day, and the first new roommate, who’s since had a baby and moved back to Toronto, said it didn’t matter anyway because they already had plenty of opportunities to meet people at parties In Real Life. And the second new roommate said that she could see the appeal for some people, and that not everyone had busy social lives like them. Then the living room went silent, and from the other side of my bedroom door I imagined them making silent pointed head gestures in my direction. Anyway, the first new roommate said. I wouldn’t judge anyone who wanted to try it, the second new roommate said.
I’d heard about Tinder from one of my coworkers at the candle store but hadn’t given it much thought. Out of curiosity, I opened the App Store on my iPhone, typed ti in the search bar, and started scrolling idly down. A few results above Tinder was an app for a pay-to-win puzzle game named Timberhouse. Beat colourful match-3 levels to design and build your very own log cabin! promised the app description. Help Austen renovate the cabin by swapping and matching pieces, unlocking ever more chapters in the exciting frontier story along the way! What are you waiting for? Make yourself at home! If I couldn’t figure out my real-life home life, maybe I could build my own virtual home.
Lacking the funds to purchase additional power-ups, I was forced to pay for my log cabin’s construction with minutes, hours, and then days of my life, as it quickly became apparent that beating the match-3 puzzles was less about skill and more about waiting for the algorithm to anoint you with the right randomly generated puzzle board. Once you’d used up your five in-game lives, you had to wait twenty-two minutes to generate one more. Sometimes, the game would reward you with fifteen, thirty, or sixty minutes of unlimited gameplay. But when these opportunities unexpectedly presented themselves, you had to drop whatever you were doing to make the most of your pause on mortality, the clock already counting down. You had to “live in the moment”. At least, that was my strategy to continue advancing, doggedly, without paying a fiat dime.
Like a global pandemic and a good orgasm, my addiction started slowly, then happened all at once. Within three months, my new relationship was eating up a huge portion of my waking life. Austen’s smugly smiling face was the first thing I saw every morning and the last thing I looked at each night. I began to view his digitally balding pate as something demonic, the conciliatory words each time I failed a puzzle as the opposite of kind. That was a close one, Bill! his chat bubble read. I’d never bothered to change my username from the randomly generated default option. Bill and I were on the edge of our seats! I know you’ll get it next time, Austen told me as he sat on the leather sofa I’d built him, and petted the stray cat that I’d rescued (which was also named Bill). At other times he was outright demanding, following me from room to room saying things like All I ever wanted was a gazebo ... or You know what would go perfectly with those curtains? A built-in tiki bar! Every puzzle I beat gave me stars that I immediately spent on Austen’s never-ending whims. I built him his gazebo and his tiki bar, as well as an underground root cellar for him to store jam in, and a dedicated dance floor complete with disco ball so he could throw a party for his mom. But it was never enough. I feared our relationship had become unhealthy, that I was giving too much and getting nothing in return.
While I’d been engaged in building my log cabin frontier home, my new roommates had moved their triplicate onto our living-room sofa, her crop tops and pleather pants in a garbage bag cum suitcase, waiting, as if I might relinquish my closet space to her at any time. One day, I came back to the real world long enough to learn my new roommates were throwing a party. I hadn’t showered or left the apartment for three days at that point, and the thought of listening to some guy compare his band to Arcade Fire (there’s always at least one) was so off-putting it jostled something loose in my nearly brain-dead mind. I remembered something one of my best friends said on a recent phone call, which I was only halfway listening to as I used up my allotment of lives. I’ve been using Tinder to meet people, my best friend said. But like, as friends, instead of hookups.
I opened the App Store, typed ti in the search bar, and scrolled past Timber House to tap Tinder. My game plan was hazy: find someone who was free that evening, looked nonthreatening, and (ideally) lived alone, then invite myself over for a “friend date” to free myself from the apartment for the night.
I didn’t meet you then—my first neutered Netflix and chill was a guy with an identical twin who lived in Westmount; after a few platonic hangs of him not putting the moves on (which had been my original goal), I started to think there was something wrong with me and tried, unsuccessfully, to make a move on him—but I did meet you shortly thereafter, my first forays into dating apps having given me the confidence to unironically swipe right. Yes, I was still seeing Austen when I met you. But the day you drove us an hour to Mont Saint Helene, made me hike up the trail in my Converse, and held my hand as we looked back at the city, an insignificant smudge on the orange-and-yellow landscape that made up the view from the top, something terrifying and wonderful happened: the next chapter of my IRL story unlocked.

QUINN MASON

is a writer that has appeared in Lemon Hound, Nashville Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Maisonneuve, and Michelin guidebooks. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph.