Cam and I hadn’t spoken in over a year when he texted: “Hey, did you just follow me on Letterboxd?”

I had.

Seeing his name on my phone electrified something below my sternum, a marquee flickering to life after years of disuse. “Yeah is that OK?” I replied. “I needed to know what you thought of Nolan’s latest.”

Letterboxd is a social platform for movie lovers, a place to log what you see (with options to rate, review and “heart”), stay abreast of what your friends are screening, and keep a running want-to-watch list.

I had followed Cam in a bout of optimism, thinking that despite our heart-wrenching breakup, here was a place we could stay connected — a plane above the egotistical gravity of earth. On Letterboxd, there are no new photos, personal updates or relationship statuses. Minimal places for jealousy to snag, for heartbreak to rear.

“TikTok told me this would happen,” he wrote. “Mercury is in retrograde and an ex would reach out from the ether.”

“Well, I’d blame Christopher Nolan over astrology,” I texted back.

“Christopher Nolan is astrology for boys.”