We've written about texting the person you're falling for, but that piece assumes a conversation exists. This is the colder, harder moment before it: the thread is empty, or dead for two weeks, and you like this person, and there is no message to reply to. Starting from nothing is its own problem, and it's the one that produces the most paralysis per character typed.
Here's what everyone does instead of starting: they wait for a pretext. An excuse to text that isn't "I was thinking about you", a question they could plausibly need answered, a thing left at a party, a birthday, anything that launders interest into logistics. Weeks pass while the pretext fails to arrive. And here's the joke buried in the strategy: the pretext fools no one. When the message finally comes, "hey, random, but do you remember the name of that bar?", your crush reads it exactly as what it is, because nobody texts someone they're indifferent to about a bar. The laundering doesn't hide the interest. It just makes the interest arrive apologizing.
So skip the laundering, and use the honest version of the same move: the specific thing that made you think of them, offered openly.
Saw a dog wearing a tiny raincoat this morning and it seemed like information you'd want.
That band you mentioned came on shuffle and now I've listened to the whole album, so this is either a thank you or a complaint.
The formula, if it's a formula: one real detail from the world, connected to one real thing about them, sent with no question mark demanding labor. The raincoat text works precisely because it's useless. It has no logistics to hide behind, which means it says the true thing, you crossed my mind, in a register light enough that nobody has to do anything about it. It's the difference between interest arriving apologizing and interest arriving relaxed.
Notice what's missing from those openers: any request for a status report. "Hey, how are you?" and "hey, what's up" are the most common cold openers and the worst, not because they're rude but because they're work. They hand your crush a blank form to fill out, generate "good, you?", and now the conversation is two people rallying pleasantries with nothing to hit. An opener's job is to be easy and specific to answer. Give them a detail to react to and the reply writes itself.
Two calibration notes, because cold texting fails at the extremes. Don't over-invest: the three paragraph opener, the essay establishing context and charm, arrives heavy and asks for a matching effort nobody cold-opens with. One or two lines. And don't performance-write: the opener workshopped for maximal wit reads exactly like what it is, and sets a bar you'll have to keep clearing. The raincoat is enough. You're not auditioning. You're checking whether talking to each other is easy, which is the actual question courtship answers.
Then the part that matters more than any wording: send it and put the phone down, on purpose, somewhere else. The cold open's real cost was never the composing, it's the exposure after, the read receipt vigil. So decide in advance that the message is complete the moment it's sent. If they're interested, a mediocre opener works fine; people who like you meet you halfway on anything. If they're not, the perfect opener would have bought you one extra polite exchange. The opener was never the variable. Whether you send one is.
The blank thread feels like it needs a brilliant first move. It needs a true, light, easy-to-answer one, and it needs it sent. Raincoat dog. Go.