By: Maya Barillas Mohan, Staff Writer 

Hey, kitten. Maybe too soon for pet names, especially because I don’t know if a second date is on the cards after the way our first one went. 

I’m sorry I picked a board game café under the ruse it would be romantic. I forgot that Monopoly is a game that takes 15 hours to play and I kept going bankrupt. I promise I’m not actually broke in real life, too . . . but I see how my card declining when I tried to renew the parking space suggests that. It’s because the bank flagged it as a suspicious purchase because I don’t usually stoop as low as that kind of joint . . . showing how much I like you!!! What kind of café has hourly parking anyway??

Also, my normal disposition is not underscored with the temper of a teething two-year-old. That was just some good old-fashioned competitive spirit. And I am not a sore loser; I just have a very keen sense of justice. The board game café’s Monopoly edition was definitely missing a whole pile of money in the box we borrowed; that’s why I was so suspicious of you as the banker. 

If we picked a different board game, things would have been way better. My rant about how much I love landlords was only because I briefly owned Boardwalk and Park Place at the same time. You looked annoyed at that, but it was kind of hard to tell because that café was so crowded with other people yelling and cheering for my massive W’s. 

At least I’m not the guy that swept the whole Sorry board and pieces off the table (I only swept the pieces . . . ). There’s the risk I would have gotten bored in the middle of a puzzle and started watching videos on my phone, but I swear I was so captivated by you it would absolutely not have happened. Besides, it’s not like we even got to know each other that well. By the time we switched to Jenga, you insisted you could only pull bricks in complete silence. What do you mean by silence? Did you just not want me to talk?? If that were the case, we could have just gone to a movie. That could have spared me the second-degree burns your spilled coffee left on my lap because theatres don’t dabble in MOLTEN JAVA. 

The coffee thing literally scarred me forever. I get that board game cafés need to have minimum spends to be profitable or whatever (because people do be loitering), but you absolutely did not need that third espresso concoction after you got so jittery from the first two. I keep it simple with a matcha latte with oat milk and light ice. Why do you even drink black coffee? Who are you trying to impress? The other intellectuals in the board game café? It was all nerds. There was a five-party wait for Scrabble! That game is rigged. You can only win if you grew up with an excessive interest in literature, I swear. 

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure we fit together like puzzle pieces like I hoped. Cracking jokes that would make you laugh was even harder than playing Operation. As these game-loving losers would say in Clue: you killed my vibe with a revolver in the lounge.