the friend who resurfaces every five months to borrow a drill

Let's talk about Dorian.

Dorian has not texted me since February. Not a birthday. Not a "how are you." Not a single reaction to the story I posted from the hospital-adjacent parking lot (long story, he'll never know it). Then, at 9:14pm on a Tuesday in July, my phone lit up like a slot machine paying out: "heyyy!! quick q."

the "quick q" is never quick and it is never a q

Here is the full transcript, preserved for the historians:

9:14pm heyyy!! quick q 9:14pm do you still have that orange drill 9:15pm OR do you know a guy for grout 9:15pm OR omg random but do you still have Marissa's number

Three questions. Zero questions about me. A texting cadence so fast it's clear he'd been drafting this in his Notes app, waiting for the exact moment his bathroom tile betrayed him.

Notice the structure. The "heyyy" with the load-bearing extra Ys — that's the wind-up. The "!!" is manufactured delight, like we just locked eyes across a wedding. And then "quick q," which is his way of pre-forgiving himself. He's telling me this'll be painless. It will not be painless. The last "quick q" ended with me driving the drill to his apartment because "you're basically on the way" — I was not on the way. I live in a different area code.

And "random but" — Dorian, it is not random. You have a spreadsheet. I'm a tab in it. Column C: "owns tools." Column D: "knows Marissa."

the five-month silence is the actual crime

The texting isn't the offense. The offense is the SEASON of silence that comes before it, engineered so precisely you could set a calendar to it.

Think about what five months contains. A full winter. A time change. Two haircuts. An entire flu. In those five months, I got a promotion, adopted a fern, and killed the fern. Dorian was informed of none of it, because Dorian's outbox only opens when Dorian's to-do list has a blocker.

You are not staying in touch. You are keeping a warm backup of me on your phone in case a task requires me. I'm not a friend. I'm a saved payment method. I'm the Rolodex you shake when something breaks.

And the tell is that he's not even bad at texting. I've seen him reply to a girl in 0.4 seconds. I've seen him send a paragraph. The man has thumbs of lightning when the stakes are romantic and thumbs of stone when the stakes are "checking on his friend of nine years." The bandwidth exists. It is simply not allocated to me unless I'm holding hardware.

This is the exact energy the group chat was invented to prosecute. If you have ever screenshotted a "heyyy quick q" and dropped it in /for/group-chats with the caption "guess who's alive," you already know: the jury has convened, and the jury is your five closest friends typing "NO WAY he sent that."

the receipts, entered into evidence

Because I am a petty archivist, I keep records. A partial ledger of Dorian's greatest transactional hits:

• March, last year: ghosts for four months, resurfaces to ask if he can "crash for one night." Stays six. Leaves a single sad banana in my fruit bowl as rent.
• The Venmo: requests $23 from me for a group dinner he organized, then never pays back the $60 I covered when his card "declined weird." Net position: Dorian is up $37 and one drill.
• The wedding: doesn't respond to my "you around this weekend?" for eleven days. On day eleven, at 7:52am, texts: "quick q do you have a suit I could borrow." He is two inches taller than me. He knew this. He was going to make it work through sheer audacity.
• The follow-up ghost: the SECOND you help him, he evaporates again. You can watch it happen in real time. "omg you're a lifesaver ok gtg" — and then the tundra. Five more months. The cycle restarts.

The most insulting part? He genuinely likes me. If I were moving apartments, Dorian would show up at 6am with coffee and lift the couch and mean it. He's not a villain. He's just running his friendships like a food delivery app — dormant until he's hungry, then extremely enthusiastic for exactly one order.

the loving fix

Here's the thing I refuse to do: send a three-paragraph "I feel like our friendship is one-sided" text. That's a Google Doc with feelings. That's a meeting. Nobody in the history of "we should talk" has ever enjoyed the "we should talk."

So instead I want him to receive one small, anonymous, beautifully petty card. No return address. No lecture. Just a piece of paper that says, essentially: we see the pattern, Dorian, and the drill is fine, and so are we, but maybe text once when nothing is broken.

Because the goal was never to lose Dorian. The goal is to get a "how are you" that isn't a wrapper around a request. To be a person to him, not a utility with a phone number. The card does the confrontation so you don't have to be weird at brunch. It's an intervention with a stamp. It's a group-chat verdict, mailed.

He'll read it. He'll laugh. He'll suspect four people. And on some quiet Tuesday five months from now, instead of "heyyy!! quick q," he'll send "hey — no reason, just thought of you." And I will faint. And then, obviously, I'll lend him the drill.

Got a Dorian? Someone who only surfaces when something's broken or borrowable? Don't send the paragraph. Send the card — make one at /create and let the mailbox do the talking.