It was springtime in the year of our Lord 2021. Two years had passed since our disastrous 2019 volleyball season, and with the world recovering from COVID, I knew the time had come to perform a recovery of our own. The problem: you need three girls to form a coed rec-league volleyball team, a nigh-impossible task for a group of navy guys. Undaunted and recognizing the direction the world was headed, I turned to a new technology; The Internet.

With a quick google search on how to talk to girls, I was able to reallocate hours normally spent reading pointless reddit articles upon the toilet to candidate interviews on algorithm-based dating applications. Months were spent recycling corny jokes, puzzling over Meijers Briggs personality letters, and pretending like I knew who Megan Markle was. Hopes were low and time was short when I found the one.

Onwards to what was either the day-before or the day-after Cinco del Mayo. We met at the Fat Cat, which I assumed is what kept her coming back to the subject. But it was somewhere between “I live near Montrose Beach” and “can serve overhand”, I knew I’d found the one. Only one of those things turned out to be true though. Time went on and we got older, and while volleyball turned into a weekday inconvenience and faded from my life, the girl stuck around and I just can’t seem to quit her.