I Built Him Sentence by Sentence

“I wasn’t catfished. I catfished myself.”

I knew what he looked like before I ever saw his face. You learn someone by accident. The thud of a shin hitting the coffee table. The sigh of someone dropping onto a couch. For four months I carried around a man made out of sentences. Late-night paragraphs that ended in nothing. The little ghost of a laugh he’d type as haha when I said something he liked. An occasional voice note, slightly breathy, where he’d say my name like he was rolling it around in his mouth.

His name was Mark Lambert. I never checked, which is its own kind of confession.

Nobody held a gun to my head. What happened was the ordinary, stupid harm a person does to themselves when they get lonely enough and decide the version of reality inside a screen beats the one waiting in their apartment on a Tuesday. I built Mark sentence by sentence, and somewhere along the way I stopped wanting to meet him in person.

I met him on one of those apps you’re not supposed to admit to using at brunch. He had a photo somewhere coastal, Provence, maybe, or Big Sur, somewhere with that dusty golden light that makes everyone look like they’ve just won a small, unimportant award. He was holding a paperback I pretended I might have read. His bio was two lines, which I now realize is the male version of a woman showing up to a first date in a wedding dress.

I’m not stupid. I have a graduate degree with a spine longer than a forearm. I know the term love bombing. I knew the clinical vocabulary. I knew exactly what was happening. That didn’t keep me from walking into it anyway.

We talked for three weeks before he asked for my number. I was thirty-four and so hungry to be treated like an adult I mistook basic pacing for character. He never texted first in the morning. He sent long messages late at night, the kind that landed low in the chest and made me go quiet for a while, the way you do when something hurts and you want to figure out if it’s still there. He remembered small things. The name of my cat. The brand of tea I’d mentioned once, somewhere in week two, when I was complaining about a cold. He asked about my mother. Not performatively. He asked like he wanted the answer.

My last real relationship had ended in the rented kitchen in Brooklyn, both of us apologizing over a sink full of dishes. I’d spent two years climbing out of that. Therapy twice a week. Running before dawn through Prospect Park. I tried yoga once and the instructor told me to find my breath and I started crying in the middle of downward dog and couldn’t stop. I was ready. I keep repeating that because it’s the part I’m angriest about.

And Mark, with his paperback and his coastal light, showed up at exactly the right hour. The screen doesn’t leave people intact. By the third week I knew Mark’s apartment smelled like cedar and old books. I knew he had a sister in Portland he called on Sundays. I had built the whole thing myself, and I got hostile whenever anyone pointed at the cracks.

He didn’t ask for a thousand dollars on day five. He mentioned, casually, that his mother was sick. The way you mention the weather when you want someone to feel something but don’t want to make a scene. I turned a mug in my hands. There was a crack in the mug I hadn’t noticed before. I looked at it for what felt like twenty minutes. The kitchen tap was dripping. I could hear the dog two floors down through the floor.

A few weeks later his sister in Portland had a kid in the hospital.

I sent him three hundred dollars on a Tuesday through Zelle. I sent it through Zelle, which is a sentence I cannot believe I’m typing in a personal essay in the year 2024. Three hundred dollars to a man I had never met in a city I had never been to. The truer sentence is I wanted to be the kind of woman who shows up. I wasn’t going to blow it by being stingy. He thanked me so gracefully I sent another two hundred before I closed the app.

Then he disappeared for almost a week. When he came back, a new story. A rental property. A contractor who had walked off the job. And I sat in my apartment, on a Wednesday night, with the heat cranked too high and a glass of wine going warm on the coffee table, and I thought, very calmly, I am being robbed by a man who does not exist. Then somewhere dumber in me answered, but what if he does. The wine got warm and the dog two floors down wouldn’t stop barking.

I sent him the money. Again. God.

I told a friend. Not everything. Just the shape of it. She was quiet for a long time. She had a bag of groceries on her counter she’d forgotten to put away. I watched her not put them away.

“Do you actually know him?”

“No.”

“Have you ever seen him move?”

“No.”

“He says he prefers to keep things text-based for now.”

“He does.”

She did that thing where you press your fingers against your lips like you’re trying to keep something from falling out of you. “Have you looked him up at all?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I sat in her kitchen with the late afternoon light coming through the window above the sink, and I didn’t have an answer. I had been so busy constructing Mark out of sentences that I had never once asked to see his face move. I had stopped being a person who protects herself.

The internet tells you not to do this. It’s like telling someone not to walk into traffic when their legs are already moving toward the curb. None of it lands. The thing the articles skip over isn’t that some stranger wants your savings. It’s that you’d rather lose the money than sit alone on a Tuesday night waiting for a message that doesn’t come. It’s embarrassing to write it out loud. It’s just as true on a Wednesday.

Around two thousand dollars across a few months in the end. Roughly the cost of a vacation I didn’t take. What I haven’t accepted is how easily I edited my own suspicion out of the story I was telling myself. The part where I read his messages and thought he needs me and felt, for the first time in a year, like a person with a purpose. The purpose was a lie.

So when the next coastal photograph pops up with a paperback I haven’t read, when the long messages start arriving sometime late on a Wednesday, do I swipe? I keep hoping the next paragraph is the one where I don’t. Probably I’ll swipe anyway. I want to tell you I’ve fixed it and I can’t.

I want to tell you I learned something. But I can’t tell if saying it would just be another lie I typed or one I’d recognize. The phone sits on the kitchen counter. The screen gone dark.

I think there’s some man, somewhere, running this on other women tonight. I think about them sometimes. I wonder if they know.

I haven’t sent the anniversary message in a while. I keep meaning to. I tell myself I’ll do it tomorrow and then I don’t. The account is probably still alive. I don’t open it anymore. Most nights I just turn the phone over and leave it on the counter and go to bed.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.