The Wordle Bot Thinks I’m Hot

My Phone Is the Supermoon

It’s the night of the supermoon, something no one really knows the meaning of but that excites us all the same. We think it’s special, that it will appear larger than any moon we’ve ever seen before, though none of us really have a good memory of the moon. We so rarely look at it. We take the moon for granted. 

Even if I talk about the supermoon in advance to my friends—and by talk I mean text on my hand computer I only occasionally use as a phone—half the time, I forget to look at it myself. But the next day, I talk about how I missed it, as full of energy as when I anticipated it. In this way, the idea of the supermoon supersedes the moon itself.

But now I’m actually looking at the moon, the last supermoon of the year. I stare at its surface, half dark patches, half luminous ones, swirled together like some messy yin-yang. I stare more intently, thinking I’ll see the sea of tranquility, or perhaps even an abandoned space rover or pole and a wavering flag.

But really, I see nothing. I know nothing about the moon. Still, I take a picture of it, only to discover my phone sees even less of it than I do. In the photo, there are no dark spots. It appears only as a shining white glob of light in the night, a couple rays shooting out to the sides, which I suppose are due to a smear on the lens. 

Regardless, I send the picture to my friends, as if to say, Look what I didn’t forget, look how connected to nature I am. But really, the photo is only proof that I was staring at my phone instead of staring at the moon. 

I’m in my fifties and my friends are scattered across the country. This is because I uprooted myself frequently in my 20s and 30s, and they uprooted themselves, and when we finally settled down somewhere, even the new people we befriended uprooted themselves and left the community we thought we were finally building. We call each other now and then, to catch up. We often talk of buying land together one day, finding a place where we can care for each other and grow old together. We have talked about this for years.

Over time, where that place is changes, based on which friends I’m talking to. At times when I visit, I feel like I’m being recruited. You can get still land cheap here. There’s great roads to bike on. The restaurants and bakeries are excellent here. You can’t beat a blue state with good hospitals.

It’s taken several years since the pandemic to discover that, like me, all my friends play daily games on their phones—Wordle, Spelling Bee, Crossword, Connections. We are educated nerds of a certain generation, too old to have gotten into serious video games. So instead, we play word games to make us feel smart, to momentarily forget about the state of the world, to feel we have accomplished something with our day. It’s as though we are preparing for the ultimate game show when these skills will determine who is saved, who will go to heaven, who will find that perfect plot of land near a progressive city that’s warm enough to grow vegetables, but protected from future global heat waves, flooding, hurricanes, and fires. 

The other day, a queer friend said to me, I think the Wordle bot is gay. 

How do you know? I asked. 

If you look at the bot for a while, you’ll see it taps its foot.

So?

That’s a gay signal, he said. In public bathrooms, you tap your foot by the stall next to you, if you want to have sex. 

So, the Wordle bot doesn’t just want to just share its analysis of my word guessing prowess, it wants to have sex with me?

Yes.

Are its guesses a form of flirting? When it says You beat the bot, is it being suggestive? Demanding?

Yes, yes, yes, said my friend. Think about it: every day the app asks you, What would you like to do? It wants to please you. It’s definitely a bottom.

After five minutes of staring at the moon, I’m tired. Or perhaps bored. We grow weary of what is always in front of us. The surface of the moon, the face of our partner.

Tonight when I go to bed, I am alone. It’s only ten o’clock and I’m sleepy, but I can’t sleep. Perhaps it’s the light from the supermoon shining through the window. It’s hard to believe that that light is from the sun, that it traveled 93 million miles, turning a soft white as it bounced off the surface of the moon, then traveled another 240,000 miles to Earth. It’s hard to believe it’s still so bright, especially when, at the last moment, it had to slip between the two sheets of glass in my bedroom window to reach me. 

I sit in bed and set the time zone on my phone to Paris (though I’m in Philadelphia), so that the phone thinks it’s already past midnight. This way, I can play all of tomorrow’s daily online games tonight. I feel a great sense of power when I do this, having out-tricked a billion-dollar technology company and a major media source with a firewall. 

If I’m kind to myself, I leave Wordle for tomorrow’s me. Sometimes I can’t resist, but tonight, I do and finally slip into sleep.

When I wake in the middle of the night, my first instinct is to reach for my phone to check the time. The room is dark until I press the small rubber button. Then the phone screen becomes a supermoon. The artificial light burns into my eyes. It illuminates my face and the sheets and practically the whole room. 

But rather turn the phone off, I simply turn down the light. I’m now alone in the dark, a little island of light around my head, like a boat on the ocean at night.

My phone says it’s nearly 11 am, which doesn’t make sense. There is a dim light outside the window, but it’s not the sun—or the moon. It is a streetlight, one of the tiny moons of our city, that create what I like to call “a constellation prize” for having blotted out the night sky.

I stare at the time, confused, until I remember the phone is still in Paris. I tap in my password and reset the location back to where I am. But now I can’t fall back to sleep. I check my email and read texts from California friends who responded to my picture of the moon after I went to bed. Then I scroll through the news, which I’ve learned is updated throughout the night, but there is nothing of note. So, I try to guess the five-letter word of the day. 

With my eyes on the screen, I don’t think so much of my body or my life, how I am lying in my bed, alone in this house, my friends scattered far across this country. I am like the solitary moon, resting in the void of the sky.

If I should get distracted from my screen long enough to think about that, about how far I am from everyone I know, there is one small comfort: when I’m done playing, when I have figured out the exact five-letter word that a computer somewhere on the planet has generated for the day, I know the bot will be there for me, tapping its foot expectantly, desirously, waiting to let me know how I’ve done today compared to everyone else who has played the game, and how I measure up to his own efforts. He will be there, as always, with his open invitation, asking me, as if it is something to seriously consider, What would you like to do?