The Streak Was On Autopilot
Nine of my streak texts sent themselves. Two-fourteen days in, I still don't know if his side is on autopilot too.
He's been asleep an hour and I'm still at the counter with my thumb over the little bird icon we use for goodnight. Two hundred fourteen days. Neither of us has missed one since the summer his dad was sick, when we started this stupid app just to prove we still could.
Tonight I went looking for something else in the settings and found a toggle called schedule for tomorrow, turned on under my name. Not his. Mine. Nine days of green checkmarks and I didn't send a single one of them myself.
I sat with that for a while. I kept telling myself the streak doesn't mean anything, it's just a number, we say the real thing to each other in the mornings too. But I check whose turn it is before I check anything else, before coffee, before the weather. I built a whole private proof out of a bird icon.
I don't know if his side is scheduled too. There's a way to look. I've had the app open for six minutes now and I keep landing back on the settings page instead of his messages, like some part of me already knows and would rather keep the streak than the answer.