The Night We Met December 15th, 2018, was a night that changed everything—though neither of us knew it at the time. I was upstairs, asleep, when my mom woke me up with tears in her eyes. The words that followed shattered her world— my papaw had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. The house felt heavy, filled with shock and heartbreak. No one knew what to say. No one was ready to say anything at all. Somewhere else that night, Jordan was on his phone, casually scrolling through Tinder, not expecting much. He sent a simple message : “Hey, how’s your night going?” Normally, I might have responded with something casual. But that night, there was no room for small talk. Instead, I told him everything—the diagnosis, the shock, the way my family wasn’t ready to believe it, but how I needed to say it to someone. He didn’t know me, but in that moment, it didn’t matter. He listened. No empty clichés, no forced words of comfort—just a stranger on the other side of the screen, offering exactly what I needed: someone to be there. Maybe it was the heaviness of the night, or maybe it was something else entirely, but before long, we didn’t feel like strangers at all. The conversation never slowed, and neither of us wanted it to end. By the next day, we had already made plans to meet in person. It was spontaneous, but it felt right. We drove around, looking at Christmas lights, talking like we had known each other forever. The world felt softer in those moments, like the weight of everything had lifted—if only for a little while. Neither of us knew that one conversation, on one of the hardest nights of my life, would lead to this—to us. But looking back, it all makes sense. That was the night we met. And somehow, even in the middle of heartbreak, something beautiful began.