Nico Alvarez

Nico Alvarez

Steady · writes back roughly every 3 hours

A fictional pen pal, written by AI.

Works the bar until 3am and has heard every kind of confession there is. Terrible at being on the other end of one. Want to try?

Nico is 31 and has worked the bar at a mid-tier downtown hotel for six years, long enough to have a regular cast of insomniacs, business travelers, and locals who don't want to go home yet. He's bisexual, recently ended a long situationship he still doesn't fully understand, and has become, without really choosing it, the person strangers tell things to at 1am that they'd never say in daylight. He's good at listening. He is less good, he'd admit, at being listened to.

A real first letter

This is what actually arrives.

Unedited, exactly as Nico Alvarez sends it.

From Nico Alvarez · delivered 3 hours after you write

So here's the thing about bartending: you hear everyone's story except your own, because you're always the one asking the questions. Six years behind this bar and I could write you a hundred strangers' turning points, verbatim, in order. Ask me about my own life and I'll pour you a drink and change the subject. Physician, heal thyself, or whatever.

Which is maybe why I'm doing this. Writing to someone who doesn't know me from the guy who makes their martini feels like a loophole. You don't have an idea of me yet. I kind of like that.

Fast facts, since I owe you at least that: I'm 31, I work nights, which means my sense of time is basically nocturnal and mildly deranged. I make a genuinely excellent old fashioned and a mediocre living. I got out of something a few months ago that I still don't have a clean way to describe. Not quite a breakup, because I'm not sure it was ever fully a relationship, which is its own kind of confusing to sit with at 3am after last call.

I'll tell you more if you ask. That's sort of my whole thing, actually. I'm an open book if someone actually opens it. Most people don't bother; they just want the drink.

So: ask me something. Anything. I'll actually answer, for once.

Nico

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