Light a candle if you have escaped the month of January without having had your heart strings jump roped by a girl on her mission to stack up as much good karma as possible. It’s a Saturday, you’re sitting solipsistically in a café that doesn’t allow laptops in your fool’s errand to finally finish Middlemarch when an immaculately dressed and kept girl steps on scene. The ingenue sits next to you and, nibbling on a cinnamon bun and draining her matcha latte while somehow keeping the milky heart intact, eyes you with modest acknowledgement of your existence. Your heart rate rises and you didn’t think it possible but Middlemarch is even harder to focus on. You flip page by page and the cinnamon bun is pared away layer by layer. She begins a new entry in her diary and your perverted attempt to decipher her thoughts is refuted by her Spanish script. The corner of your own journal page is looking a quite attractive canvas for your WhatsApp number and her hand an even more attractive recipient. You want to slap yourself - not every girl who glances in your direction is looking for a date, go back to picking apart Eliot you massive mega narc (narcissist). And while you’re wallowing in this self-defeat, one blink goes by and a note is on your unread page of Middlemarch. Struck dumb in paralysis, you watch the love of your life smile at you and leave the café as quickly as she came. Unfolding the note you are greeted with the neat cursive of your lost beauty, prose more proseful than all of Eliot’s if anything by virtue of the femme it came from: “You’re very pretty. You have a calm energy.” It's 2pm and Eliot is officially abandoned for the day as you can only mutter in grief for the number you never got nor gave: goddamn these random acts of kindness.