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Author's note: I will be using @rbhayes account for my journey back into writing from hereon.
shoutout to @shadowspub for the daily prompt (subscribe to her newsletter)
Fiction: An AI-powered dating app starts matching people based on their deepest regrets rather than their interests, with unexpected results.
Joseph stared at the screen of his phone, not quite certain if the curdling sense in the pit of his stomach was due to anxiety or excitement. It had been nearly a year since he had been matched with Lena on the app, 9 months of an unusual courtship that seemed to have bound him to her haunting presence and seemingly familiar face.
Closure.exe, was the “dating app” he had decided to download all those months ago, its promise to match its users based on their deepest regrets became a sort of meme among the younger folks, labelling it as a ‘trauma-bonding’ of sorts. Though only after having encountered videos of veterans having found their life-long companions on the app did Joseph try to check it out.
Despite not being a veteran himself, carrying this guilt he felt for over a decade took a toll on his mental well-being, catching himself looking over his shoulder as if he’d sooner be found out from that accident way back in his late 20’s during a night of driving drunk from his graduation party. It wasn’t until he met Lena did he slowly start to feel it all come into focus, just looking at her made him feel like he wanted to be a better version of the young man he was from back then.
He almost dropped his phone when her reply lit up the screen, he hadn’t noticed he stared off into space, lost in his own thoughts yet again. Still, her agreeing to meet with him brought a smile to his face, though he had to wonder why she had asked to meet at a specific street corner when he could very well have picked her up at her place before they drove to the nearest restaurant.
It had been a while since he went back to this place… Too close to his hometown and that incident, although he knew Lena grew up somewhere near here so he always thought it was one of the reasons why he felt like she was familiar to him, the nighttime crickets the only sound being heard along the suburban streets that kept them company in their quiet stroll.
Fumbling with the ringbox he had in his jacket’s pocket, Joseph could not decide on how to open the topic of his recent promotion in his firm, the aura around them seeming to feel solemn before he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. A slow build of dread dripping in his veins as he began to notice which particular street he and Lena were in, his breath hitching as he watched her pull out a lily from inside her coat as she gingerly place it by the base of the lamppost they stood under.
Suddenly, he was there again – a blurry figure crossing the street in the dead of night, screeching of tires before a horrified scream that momentarily rendered him sober enough to drive away from the scene. And now, under the same lamppost where it had last happened, it all started to make sense why Lena’s face had always seemed familiar until this point.
“I regret never going after the person who killed my sister, Joseph.” Lena’s voice broke the eerie stillness that seemed to surround them now, “But Lydia wasn’t just my sister, she was my twin. And I remember it was you who I saw that night.”
The sound of both their phones going off with an all too familiar notification seemed to have brought his world to a stop, knowing what the app had to say: “Match Complete. Closure Achieved.”
My books are now available:
Never Bother
Don't You Cry No More
DYCNM Book cover design by @viking-ventures
More credits: Commissioned Cover 1, part 3 - Viking Visual Art Tutorial
NB Book cover design by @ilovewintergem
New fanfiction in progress on my YT channel: R.B.Hayes
An interesting dating concept opposite of what one would suspect. But then I can see that individuals were matched on their regrets, they may be able to help each other through the trauma. It's a bit eerie, though, how the dating app knew to pair those two regrets over the same incident. Heartbreaking that I feel he was about to propose then he got exposed. Perhaps they shared the tragedies in their profiles. An awesome story that fit perfectly the prompt.
Thanks for sharing. Take care and have a good rest of your week.
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