At 5:11 p.m. on a Friday, my phone buzzed with a message from Matt. I was deep in work for my graduate program, and his text left me momentarily stunned. The same Matt who had ghosted me despite promising to call was now reaching out again. “Hey! Are you in OC still? I’m visiting Noah for the weekend and if you are, I was curious if you’d be game to meet up and have a long-awaited chit chat!!”

The day he ghosted me, Matt had told me, “I’m free to call you on Thursday. I’ll check my schedule and confirm tomorrow.”

He never did although his profile picture — Modigliani’s portrait of Jean Cocteau — consistently lingered under my Instagram Stories views. This ghosting, though familiar, felt particularly jarring.

We had met on Instagram. We were both alumni of the same college. He had swiped up on one of my Instagram Stories: a snippet from an Andy Warhol interview with Joan Didion. “This is perfect, what is this from?” he asked. We texted back and forth about Didion, Southern California and the drought that had marked our teenage years. We bonded over the irony of leaving our hometowns only to return.

Despite our deep chats and daily texts about Scorsese movies, iconography and William T. Vollmann, our relationship remained undefined. I was still nursing the wounds of a spring breakup, and though Matt never asked me out, our rambling conversations were intoxicating. This was new and thrilling, especially compared to my most recent relationship, which had been stifling and lacked chemistry.

In the whirlwind of Southern California, where relationships in your 20s can feel as fleeting and unpredictable as traffic on the 405, Matt seemed like a refreshing anomaly. He had played college baseball, but insisted that his real passions were more aligned with Terrence Malick, Nietzsche and obscure indie bands.

However, it wasn’t long before Matt started ghosting me — often mid-conversation. After I hadn’t heard from him in three months, despite his consistent viewing of all my Stories, my friends urged me to cut ties. “I’ll buy you a chai if you finally remove his ass,” my friend Allie said jokingly. I did, and we laughed over drinks, celebrating the end of this particular chapter.

Matt requested to follow me again on Instagram many months later. One morning, while I was driving down to Long Beach, his name popped up on my locked screen. I accepted his request and followed him back, assuming that he would address his absence. He did not. I shot him a brief iMessage asking what was new. Our resulting exchange was friendly but shallow, and he vanished again, resurfacing a month later to swipe up on a Story about a band we both liked.

We started texting back and forth every day again, him professing that he had been directing his time and energy toward “love and becoming” and noting that he felt unable to dialogue deeply with others until “the energy paradigm has been met, ideally down to the quantum level.” Eventually, I asked him to call, and he agreed enthusiastically, stating that he admired me and chuckling that this had been “a long time coming.”

And in a story as old as time, he promised me that he would confirm and then he promptly proceeded to ghost me again. It was that weekend when I discovered he’d been dating someone. I felt uncomfortable, as I never would have been able to tell he was in a relationship. He had said nothing about a partner. I sent him a couple of voice messages expressing my discomfort.

He didn’t open my messages, and then, of course, reached out again on another platform, eager to plan dinner with me while he was back in town. I was in a Huntington Beach coffee shop on a Saturday morning, sipping a lavender latte, when he called to finalize plans. We arranged to walk after Mass, but he never responded to my message about timing (“it’s Novus Ordo, so what about 5:30?”).

The following morning, I ended our connection, telling him that he lacked follow-through and that it was astounding that he could wax poetic about so many things and yet treat me more like an abstract concept than a person with feelings — someone who wouldn’t be hurt because she was on the other side of the screen and couldn’t be touched. He didn’t reply. He just stopped following me on Instagram.

If that wasn’t enough, a girlfriend from college informed me that one of her close friends had a similar experience with him several years back.

Unfortunately, the line between “indie f—boy” and “man who shares my passions and interests” has proved to be incredibly thin.

As a graduate student in theology and library science, it can be challenging to find a guy who can sustain a meaningful conversation. But it was through Matt that I realized it can sometimes be worse when the guy is actually able to. Despite his insistence on portraying himself as a “creative” and “artist,” he was more invested in curating a persona than in maintaining a stable connection.

Sure, he called himself a co-founder of a filmmaking studio, but the artsy black-and-white photos of him smoking tobacco and staring off into the distance at the Getty made it clear that he was most interested in playing the role of the brooding and misunderstood artist — someone who enjoyed possessing me when it was comfortable for him, but had no real desire to reciprocate. I wasn’t his friend; I was the scene partner in his A24 movie.

As I told him in my final iMessage, effectively ending our on-and-off connection that had never culminated in a meetup, “I’m a person behind the screen, not a philosophy book, not an intellectual fantasy.” A man acting like the protagonist in a Cigarettes After Sex song, I told myself while deleting his contact information, isn’t going to be the great love of your life.

The author is a writer and graduate student living in the Greater Los Angeles area. She’s on Instagram: @julialouisemorrow

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

For nearly half a century, Ursula Boschet has run a legendary costume shop in Los Angeles.

Enter its doors, and ghoulish masks of past presidents stare down at you from above a wall of wacky, colorful wigs. An impressive collection of stick-on mutton chops, mustaches and goatees — all made of real human hair — is neatly arranged underneath a glass counter. Signed headshots of Hollywood stars decorate the walls, a who’s who of the shop’s famous clientele.

Now, the shop will close its doors for good.

“It’s not like it used to be,” says Boschet, the 90-year-old owner and costume designer. Fewer customers come in to see the costumes in person, she says, because of online shopping. And she says rent and the cost of employees is too high for her to afford. Plus, she’s ready to retire — “I can’t wait ‘til I’m 100!” she jokes.

Boschet is closing shop after nearly half a century in business.

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Boschet has been designing clothing and costumes for as long as she can remember. “It’s just my thing,” she says. She became a tailor at 14 years old, in post-war Germany. She still has a thick, Stuttgart accent. “I learned everything in Europe. Everybody had a trade back then,” she says.

She and her late husband, Herman Boschet, both immigrated to the United States in 1962. Herman began a custom-framing business, and Ursula designed costumes for theater companies, Hollywood studios and even for Disney parades. In 1976, she opened her costume store in Culver City, before moving the business about 30 years ago to Santa Monica, where it still stands today.

There are still hundreds of handmade costumes in the back of the store, many designed and sewn by Boschet herself. The small, cramped section in the back used to be the rental department, but now, there are price tags on all the merchandise — everything is for sale. Boschet hopes to make it through one final Halloween. Although, as her website reads: “Every day is Halloween at Ursula’s Costumes.”

Racks of costumes stretch from floor to ceiling, adorned with velvety Renaissance dresses, chain-and-leather glam rocker getups and everything in between.

Boschet flips through a lookbook full of her custom designs.

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“We have belly dancers, genies … a little bit of everything,” she says. “We made all this over 48 years.” A neat row of massive animal heads lines the top of the wall, including bunnies, pandas, pigs and a giant goldfish head. “They’re all different, there is not one [costume that is] the same,” says Boschet.

The shop is a draw for everyday Angelenos, but lots of celebrities, too — Kate Beckinsale, Victoria Tennant and Steve Martin have frequented Boschet’s store over the decades. In fact, Boschet became so well known for her talents among the Hollywood crowd that she says she was tapped to play an extra in a few movies, including in the 1980 TV drama The Jayne Mansfield Story starring Loni Anderson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Her role? A tailor.

She grows nostalgic as she flips through the pages of a lookbook, many of which feature old photos of Herman and Ursula dressed as Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Morticia Addams, and Herman’s favorite: Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. “We did everything you could think of,” she says.

Ghoulish masks of famous political figures, ornately beaded headpieces and props hang from the walls and ceiling. Customers can come in and share their ideas with Boschet, and she helps them bring that vision to life.

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Even when Herman would protest wearing a costume to a party, Ursula says she would lay one out for him, and when he’d return home from work, “he didn’t say a word.” He would put on the costume “and he would have the most fun,” she laughs. “Because costumes are fun! You can be whatever you want.”

Despite vicious competition from online sellers, some customers still prefer the bespoke experience of creating custom costumes with Boschet. Actor Jamie Lee Curtis — who, fittingly, starred in the 1978 horror movie Halloween — has been patronizing Ursula’s Costumes for decades.

“We were devotees of Ursula’s in my house,” she told NPR. “We were starting to think about Halloween in February, like we were already starting to discuss ideas.” Curtis’ daughter Ruby is a cosplayer, so Ursula’s Costumes was a frequent stop for her. Ruby’s recent wedding was cosplay-themed, and Curtis says many guests purchased their costumes from Boschet’s shop. “[Ursula] loves a collaboration,” says Curtis. “When I would go in and present the picture of what it was we were trying to create, you could see her light up.”

Every costume is now for sale as Boschet prepares to say goodbye to her shop.

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When NPR spoke to Curtis for this story, it was the first she had heard of Ursula’s Costumes shuttering, and said she “wept” at the news. “I just want to say thank you to her for having a place to create magic and fantasy for people. It’s a service. And now, of course, there’s the internet,” says Curtis. “But it’s not the same as having someone use their creativity to help you express yours.”

Boschet, too, expresses deep gratitude for customers for having supported her shop over nearly half a century. Now, she looks forward to a long-needed vacation. She says she hopes to enjoy what L.A. has to offer, including the cinema. But she says she’ll be paying attention to the costumes, not the plot. “Of course! The story? Everyone knows that!”