‍ WRITER’S NOTE

What do you do when the only date you can't escape is haunted by every date you've already had?

Roger swipes through faces he doesn't recognize until suddenly he does: an ex he ghosted, one he blamed, one he simply outlasted rather than loved. The app stops offering him anyone new. Instead it hands him back everyone he's already failed, in order, whether he wants the rerun or not.

This one is more personal than I usually let on. I was eighteen, a freshman, certain for the first time in my life. She broke it off over Thanksgiving, cleanly and finally, the way Roger's exes do in these flashbacks. I don't know that I ever fully closed that door. I think most people carry one relationship like that: the one that ends and still doesn't end, that keeps resurfacing somewhere in your head long after the person is gone.

I wanted to write a love story about a specific kind of cowardice. Not the man who cheats, but the one who quietly clears out before things get real, who mistakes leaving early for protecting himself. Nanette isn't a lesson Roger learns once. She's a person he has to choose again, on purpose, after the app has already shown him every place he chose wrong before.

PREEXISTING started as a joke about how a dating app never lets you forget anyone. It became a story about a man who finally stops running: not from her, but from what he already knows love costs.

-Leonard Tachmes, M.D.