I have spent the last few days inside 5,117 messages of sunshine emojis, unreturned mornings and one grown woman running a five-month undercover operation on a man who thinks she is his free concierge service.
You are not his friend. You are not even his crush. You are a breakfast radio host with a single listener who keeps the volume off, and every morning at 8.02 you open the mic anyway to inform him that the sun has risen, as though he has no window.
Let’s look at the ratings.
Who Is Doing All the Work Here
Nurul: The Sunrise Spam Bot
You have greeted the same man every single morning for five months like an alarm clock that is in love with him. The sun comes up, the sticker goes out, and he replies whenever it suits him, which is roughly the schedule of a comet. You opened this whole affair with a fake emergency about his water bottle, the oldest trick ever invented, and still fumbled it:
hi! it's me from the 3.30 badminton session, you left your water bottle
oh lol thanks, keep it
ok I'll keep it safe for you!! 😊
Keep it safe for you. He said keep it the way you tell a cashier to keep the change, and you built it a shrine. Since then you have replied in ninety seconds flat, laughed in capital letters at jokes he barely finished, and never once told him what any of this is for, which makes you a candidate running for office without telling the only voter there is an election. The one person in this chat who has not worked out that you fancy him is him, and that is entirely because you have never had the nerve to type it.
Jared: The Haha Vending Machine
Jared is a vending machine with one button: insert any amount of emotion and out drops a haha. You once wrote him a full paragraph about a manager who made you rebuild a deck at midnight, and this is what the machine dispensed:
and then he said the whole thing has to be redone by 9am, after I stayed till 11 on friday, I'm so done
haha classic
Haha classic is not sympathy, it is a review of your suffering: two stars, would read again. Yet the machine has a second speed, the one he finds when he needs dinner spots near Bugis or a once-over on his resume, requested and chased up within minutes by a man who otherwise replies on the timetable of overseas post. He is not slow, he is selectively fast, which makes him less a crush and more a customer with a loyalty card and no intention of buying anything.
The Trap: Haha Inflation
Everything in this chat travels one way. You start, you ask, you share, you sign off with a sticker; he receives, he laughs, he leaves. I call it Haha Inflation: in April his haha meant he was amused, and by September it was the only currency in circulation, and you were still accepting it at face value, in bulk, like a woman paying her rent in Monopoly money.
Your whole operation runs on one theory: if you are there daily, never needy and always quick, he will eventually do the maths and arrive at you. He will never do the maths, because you hid all the working, and a man who answers your bad day with two words is not going looking for hidden variables.
You have been confessing to him every day in a code he does not know exists, and he keeps answering in the only word he owns.
Your Private Dialect, Translated
Good morning ☀️ means I thought about you before I brushed my teeth. HAHAHA 😭 means I am laughing for both of us and sending you the invoice. np is his reply to your thanks, the shortest known way to be unthanked.
His rarest phrase is thought of u, which turns up so seldom it belongs on an endangered species list, and every time it appears he staples a lol to it, like a man writing down a feeling and immediately asking for a refund. On 17 May it came attached to a video of a cat in a bucket, and you have since treated that cat like a signed confession.
A Live Reading: 13 August
Here is the nearest thing to a love scene in the archive, at 8.05am on the morning of your big presentation, entirely unprompted:
all the best today!! you got this
omg you remembered!! 🥹
haha of course
He remembered. A man who cannot remember to reply remembered a date you mentioned once, in passing, a week earlier, and the whole archive lit up like a void deck at Deepavali. Then you brought him the result:
It went SO well!! The director asked three questions and I answered all of them!!
haha nice
thank you for the good luck message btw, it really helped
np
He opened the day with two exclamation marks and closed it with a shrug, and you thanked the shrug. He is perfectly capable of the sentence; he has just never needed to spend it on you, because you keep paying full price for the haha.
The Timeline
4 April. The water bottle gambit, which he donates to your campaign without noticing there is a campaign.
17 May. The cat in the bucket arrives with thought of u lol, and you start reading lol as a typo for love.
13 August. Good luck at breakfast and haha nice by dinner, one day and two completely different men.
12 September. He asks you to come and cheer at his tournament, you say YES before he has finished typing, and he answers cool, which is what people say to a delivery update.
What You Each Wanted
Nurul, you wanted to be noticed without ever having to say so, which is like standing silently at a hawker stall and getting annoyed that the uncle has not read your mind. You wanted one question about you, and a second about the answer, and you have spent five months waiting for him to ask while making sure he never has to.
Jared wanted a friend who needs no maintenance: funny, quick and always on call, with nothing owed. He has one, she is quietly drafting a wedding seating plan in her notes app, and because nobody has ever made him decide anything, he has mistaken the silence for a free service.
The Ruling
Does he like you back? He likes the mornings, the speed and the free errand service, and he has no idea all three are one woman who is hoping. You are not his crush, Nurul, you are his most reliable notification, and nobody in history has ever fallen in love with a notification.
