Sometimes you meet someone and feel instantly and inexplicably drawn to them. I’m not speaking in an exclusively romantic sense, despite the title of this post. It’s the boy you meet one day in the first week of class and, less than half an hour after being first introduced, you somehow find yourself inviting him back to your grotty student flat to cook him flavourless spaghetti and now nearly 4 years later he’s one of your closest friends. It’s the girl from that party you went to a month before you left the country for a year and by the end of the night spent together, your cheeks ache from laughing and you’re both exclaiming, “If only we’d met each other sooner!” It’s hating having your haircut for twenty years until you meet a hairdresser whose huge blue eyes calm you and suddenly you’re looking forward to your next appointment.

A friend of one of my housemates is one of such people. I never felt shy or awkward talking to him like I normally do speaking to people I don’t know. He comes to stay at our house from every couple of months or so and every time he remembers something I told him the last time he visited and asks me a question about it, which I always appreciate.

One time, a few months back, he came to visit. He’d just started using a new Scrabble app on his phone and wouldn’t stop playing. There were five or six other people there, I don’t particularly remember who, what I do remember is him asking me, and only me, to download it so “we could play each other.”

I obliged. A couple of weeks later, on the instant messenger installed on this Scrabble app, he asked for my Snapchat username so he could send me pictures “when I wasn’t playing my turn fast enough.”

A couple of weeks after that, he said that “he never had anything to take pictures of” and asked for my number so he could Whatsapp me instead when I was being too slow.

I thought it was an elaborate way to ask for my number, but I can’t say I minded.

I’m afraid to say, however, that the title of this post is quite misleading - as is the photo, if you associate rainbows with hope. The story pretty much ends here. Apart from the odd, brief catch-ups here and there, quite amusingly he only ever uses my number to talk to me about our Scrabble games. I suppose I was too hasty in assuming that his interest was in me, when in fact it would appear that he is more enthusiastic about online Scrabble than I initially appreciated. You win some and you lose some (and in this case, I’m losing far more than I win, considering my current streak of 6 Scrabble defeats in a row).