It was 2 p.m. on a Saturday in early January when I drove to Silver Lake to pick up a table from Facebook Marketplace.
It was one of those dramatic Los Angeles afternoons when the sky had darkened early and rain felt inevitable. I had been searching for a Midcentury Modern table for my new apartment, 33 floors above downtown L.A. After a year in Long Beach, I was moving again, trying for a clean beginning after the traumatic end of a nine-year relationship.
Facebook Marketplace pickups aren’t supposed to be intimate. You arrive, look the thing over, act a little indifferent, maybe negotiate, then hand over cash or Venmo the seller and leave. I had already decided to offer $700, a hundred less than the seller was asking.
But when I walked toward the house, the first thing I noticed was the woman waiting outside. She was Korean, in her 30s and pretty in a way that didn’t announce itself. And then she said my name correctly.
“Huy?”
Not “Wee.” Not “Huey.” Not the small pause people make before deciding they don’t want to try.
“Huy.”
It was such a small thing, but I noticed. I had spent my whole life hearing people get my name wrong.
She led me inside, and I glanced at the table. Clean lines. Warm wood. Exactly what I had been looking for. Within minutes, we were no longer talking about furniture. Somehow we were talking about life transitions and grief.
I told her that I was moving to downtown L.A. after a brief stay in Long Beach and years living in West L.A. I needed a reprieve from something I had gone through.
She told me she was selling as much as she could because she was thinking of leaving L.A. and moving back to Orange County. She was in the middle of a breakup, and her ex was moving out that weekend.
There we were: two strangers in Silver Lake, surrounded by furniture being sold off piece by piece, both trying to make new lives from the remains of our old ones.
And then, because apparently I no longer know what is normal to say during a Facebook Marketplace transaction, I told her, “Yeah, I just got out of a nine-year relationship. It ended in total chaos — legally, emotionally, all of it.”
She looked at me the way anyone should look at a man who had come to buy a table and somehow ended up revealing a past he was still trying to heal from.
Concerned. Curious. Alert.
“I know that sounds intense,” I said, half-laughing. “There’s context. I promise. I’ve been telling the story in the L.A. storytelling circuit, and it recently became a podcast episode.”
This was either a red flag or a very Los Angeles credential, depending on the neighborhood.
She asked for the episode. I sent it to her.
“Oh, wow,” she said. “You’re like a mini-celebrity.”
“Yeah,” I said sheepishly. “I guess you could say that.”
By the time I loaded half the table into my car, I had forgotten all about my plan to negotiate. I paid the full $800. The other half wouldn’t fit, so I asked if I could come back the following week. Before I left, I told her to listen to the podcast and let me know what she thought.
The next day, she texted. She had listened and said she could empathize with so much of what I had shared.
A week later, I returned for the other half of the table. By then, I was no longer just the guy from Facebook Marketplace.
“Wow,” she said. “I can’t believe you endured something like that.”
Then she said, “If you’re ever around and want to grab a drink, that’d be cool.”
I didn’t hear it as a romantic invitation exactly. I had been through too much to know what to do with ambiguity.
But it moved me. Not because I thought, “Oh, this woman wants me.” More because I had handed a stranger one of the most vulnerable parts of my life, and she didn’t step away. She opened a door.
A few days later, I got a text from an acquaintance I hadn’t spoken to in years.
“Hey,” he wrote. “Were you recently on Facebook Marketplace? Did you buy a table from Michelle?”
He and Michelle were close friends. She had told him about meeting an anesthesia provider who did sound baths in the operating room and had been on a podcast. Stranger still, he knew the friends who had taken me in after everything fell apart — people who had become part of the story I told in the podcast.
Because this is Los Angeles, where everyone is anonymous until suddenly everyone is connected.
Eventually, I took Michelle up on her invitation.
We met at Thank You Coffee in Chinatown and sat outside. She brought her dog, a small, rambunctious golden doodle who kept moving around under the table. I ordered a third-wave coffee from China, which I didn’t even know existed. Then we walked to a pastry shop and picked up a few things to share.
She had a slight lisp, and I remember thinking how specific her voice felt. How real she was, sitting there in the middle of her own life coming apart.
At some point, I asked what made her want to have coffee with me.
She told me her ex was a public defender, and he had shared stories about the lives people carry beneath the facts of their cases. She said it taught her that you can’t judge a book by its cover.
With the podcast episode out, I worried people would hear the worst part first and decide they already knew me. But Michelle didn’t do that.
Sitting there outside Thank You Coffee, I felt something in me soften. I could sit with someone new and tell the truth. I could listen to her tell the truth back. And for the first time in a while, I could feel my heart open without needing to turn the moment into a future.
By the time the table was in my apartment, 33 floors above downtown Los Angeles, I wondered if that was what I had been doing all along — seeing if I still believed in beginnings.
Maybe that was too much to ask of a table. Or a woman I met in Silver Lake. Or one coffee in Chinatown. But something had shifted. Michelle was not the answer. I’m not even sure there was a question. She was just a woman who said my name correctly, listened to a story I was afraid would make me untouchable and stayed curious.
And maybe, for now, I could too.
The author is a certified registered nurse anesthetist at UCLA Medical Center. He lives in downtown L.A. He’s on Instagram: @polycrna.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
