Someone posted a personal ad this week searching for a stranger they sat next to at the 6:15 showing of Project Hail Mary at AMC Kabuki. The details are almost painfully endearing: a guy in a baseball cap with a "contagious, genuine laugh," a girl flying solo on a Friday night, and a small act of kindness — he turned on his phone flashlight and helped her fish her phone out from under the seat before the lights came up. Then his friends pulled him away, and that was that.

No Instagram handle exchanged. No QR code. No Hinge profile. Just two people sharing a moment in the dark and one of them brave enough to throw a message in a bottle afterward.

We bring this up not just because it's charming — though it absolutely is — but because it's a quiet rebuttal to the narrative that San Francisco has lost its soul. The Kabuki is a Japantown institution that has survived everything from streaming wars to pandemic shutdowns to the city's own hostility toward small business. The fact that people are still showing up, sitting next to strangers, laughing out loud, and performing tiny acts of decency for each other? That's the real city.

No government program created that moment. No $4 million "community engagement initiative" facilitated it. Just a movie theater, a dropped phone, and a flashlight.

So if you're a guy in a baseball cap who saw Project Hail Mary at AMC Kabuki last Friday with two friends and helped a stranger find her phone — someone's looking for you. Go get that coffee.

The rest of us will be over here rooting for you like it's the fourth quarter.