A nubbed Palo Santo's smoke billowed through a buff-colored hand-me-down studio apartment on Grove Street—once a nightclub in the ’80s—in the West Village of New York. Nooked on a Casper mattress sans her ivory embroidered sheets (laundry day), Trisha (jadedly) swiped on Bumble: left, left, left, right. Faint strumming hummed from her record player on the shelf: "Pale Blue Eyes" by The Velvet Underground. A purple wax candle took refuge on a bedside table that also held a small, almost too little to write in, diary. Dead flowers hung upside down thanks to a yellow tack on the wall. Gold chains from Delhi lazed in a copper ring dish. Trisha spent the past eight months perfecting this Zen Den: the apartment. An ozone of equanimous girldom. She closed the damned app and placed her iPhone next to her on the bed like a small pet worthy of such comfort. She closed her eyes. Meanwhile, in Park Slope, Brooklyn (though geographically in Gowanus), two small, overweight but universally adorable girl cats slept peacefully next to each other on a mid-tier IKEA couch, like two tree logs in a lumberyard. Josh, Sam's taller yet younger brother, had Grand Theft Auto on pause to quickly switch HDMI cables and check the Knicks score. Sam stood in the kitchen preparing dinner. He looked up the name of the actress who played the young daughter, Ellen, in Fatal Attraction (1987). He was pleasantly surprised to learn that her name is also Ellen in real life. She’s currently doing well and recently did a photo op for the film's 30th anniversary with co-star Michael Douglas. We'll later learn that this is mostly what Sam did in his spare time…before meeting Trisha. Sam swiped right while simultaneously cooking the sixth installment of ground turkey (90/10 fat ratio) and white rice that week, garnished with ketchup. According to the Pew Research Center, cisgender men are four times as likely to swipe right on any given potential match as cisgender women. The moment Sam's thumb cleared the perimeter of the screen necessary to complete a full swipe, a digital conjunction occurred... A combination of database queries, server-client interactions, real-time data synchronization, and secure data transmission over networks resulted in an alignment. When two users swipe right ("like" each other), the app’s backend runs a query that searches for mutual interests in the database. But this moment hailed from the ironic divine—an instant caught between being too late to explore the Earth and too early to explore the Universe. There were no mutual interests—only the antagonism of two disparate people: New York-born vs. California-born; working in finance vs. working in film; Indian-American vs. Italian-American; gregarious and bubbly personality vs. calm and inward-looking; optimism vs. realism; business vs. art. But in physics, electromagnetism is the principle of opposite charges attracting each other. In dating computing, this was a paradigm shift in the algorithmic infrastructure, a blazed trail of latency. Apocalypto. The Palo Santo embers flared. The ground turkey splattered. In an overwrought and extremely convoluted way, I’m trying to tell you: there was a match...