I work as a derrickhand on a drilling platform about a hundred and forty miles off the Louisiana coast, and my schedule is twenty-one days on, twenty-one days off, which the men out there call a hitch. A helicopter takes us out from Houma in the morning, low over water that goes from brown to green to a blue so dark it looks like it has no bottom, and then there is the platform standing on its legs in the middle of nothing, and for three weeks that is the entire world. People picture offshore work as dangerous, and parts of it are, but danger is not the thing that wears on you. What wears on you is that the world shrinks down to about forty men and a few thousand square feet of steel, and there is nowhere to go and no one new to meet, and you learn very quickly that loneliness is not the same thing as being alone.

The strange part is that I am almost never alone out there. I share a room, I eat every meal in the galley with the same crew, and during a tour I am within arm's reach of somebody for twelve hours straight. But after the first week of a hitch you have already heard everyone's stories, and they have heard yours, and the conversation flattens out into the same handful of grooves it always finds, about the food and the weather and whatever is wrong with the equipment that day. I am close with these men in the way you can only be close with people who have watched you do a hard job badly on no sleep, and I would trust most of them with my life, and I have run out of things to say to them by day nine. That is a specific kind of quiet, being surrounded by people you know too well to surprise and not well enough to sit silent with comfortably.

You would think the answer is to call home, and I do call home, but a call home is not really a conversation in the sense I started to miss. When I get my wife on the slow platform connection the call is about logistics and reassurance, about whether the truck got fixed and whether I am being careful, and underneath every word is the work both of us are doing to make twenty-one days of absence feel survivable. I love those calls and they cost me something every time, because they are a performance of being fine for someone who needs me to be fine. What I found myself wanting, somewhere in the middle of a long hitch last winter, was the opposite of that: a conversation with a person who needed nothing from me and to whom I owed no reassurance, somebody who did not know my wife's name or my crew or what I do for a living, somebody I could simply talk to and then never talk to again.

A motorman named Dwayne, who reads more than anyone would guess to look at him, was the one who mentioned Knotchat to me one night when we were both up too late in the galley. He said it had gotten him through his own bad hitches, and he described it in a way I did not really believe until I tried it, as a place where you get put with one stranger at a time and talk for as long as it stays interesting and then it simply ends. The thing that made it work offshore, the practical thing, is that it runs fine on a text connection that can barely hold a video call, so on a platform where the satellite link crawls it was one of the only ways to reach a person who was not already forty feet away from me. I opened it the first time expecting nothing, mostly to be able to tell Dwayne I had.

What I had not understood from his description is how much it matters that the person on the other end has no idea who you are. The whole design of a random chat platform like that is that you arrive as nobody, with no history and no profile and no reputation that follows you out of the conversation, and for a man who spends three weeks at a time being a known quantity to forty other men, being nobody for half an hour was a kind of rest I did not know I needed. The first person I talked to was a woman in Halifax waiting out a snowstorm who wanted to argue about whether lighthouses are romantic or just sad, and I told her I worked on something not entirely unlike a lighthouse and that the answer was both, and we talked for an hour, and at no point did I have to be careful with her the way you are careful with people whose lives are tangled up in yours.

I have done it on most hitches since, late, after my tour, when the platform noise drops to the hum it never fully loses and my roommate is asleep and the only light is the screen. I talked one night with a retired schoolteacher in Manchester who was up early with a bad hip and had opinions about everything, and another time with a kid in Manila teaching himself to play the bass from videos, who wanted to know whether it was too late to get good at something at twenty-six, and I told him I had not learned half of what I know offshore until I was older than that, which is true and which I had never said out loud to anyone. None of those people knew my name. I will never speak to any of them again. If you have ever been surrounded by people and still felt unreachable, you understand why a place like https://knot.chat ends up meaning something out of all proportion to how simple it is, which is just a stranger, and then another stranger, with nothing owed in either direction.

I am back on land now, halfway through my twenty-one off, and the thing I keep noticing is how rarely I actually talk to a stranger here, where there are millions of them. I get my coffee and I keep my eyes down and I move through a whole day of being near people without once saying something true to one I do not already know. The platform taught me that you can be lonely in a crowd, and it took being stuck on one to teach me the reverse, that the cure was never more people or even the right people, but the particular freedom of saying something honest to someone who has no stake in you at all. I learned that two hundred miles out, on a slow connection, from people whose faces I never saw, and I am still trying to figure out how to want it this badly when I am standing on solid ground with no excuse not to.