Full disclosure: Earlier this week I posted several of these missed connections to Chicago’s Craigslist, intended for inclusion in this feature for The Media. Several were posted to Twitter and were reprinted in Vice and The Gloss before I had the chance to tell anyone outside of those who were in the room when we hit publish. Any spelling mistakes and references or resemblances to persons living or dead were intentional. Otherwise, however, all of these entries are fictional, or in the very least, fake. Having now experienced the joys and pains of being a troll, I no longer have faith that anything on the Internet is real. Nor do I believe that any of the other missed connections posted to Craigslist that I did not write are real either.

P.S. Jenn Pelly and Jonathan Williger provided background reporting and creative consultation to the creation of this piece.