Read Receipts

He read it forty minutes ago. He hasn’t replied. And in forty minutes my brain has constructed seventeen reasons why, all of which end with him leaving.

He’s busy. I know that. He has a life. A job. A timezone. He is not obligated to respond to every message within the window my anxiety deems acceptable. I know this. Logically. Intellectually. In the part of my brain that has read the books and done the therapy and understands attachment theory.

The other part of my brain. The part that was built in the quiet house and reinforced by the musician and cemented by the husband. That part has already written the breakup and packed the emotional bags and started the grieving process.

Because silence is never just silence when your operating system was coded on it. Silence is the gap before his mood changed. Silence is the night before the comments started. Silence is him in the next room thinking I was dead and not checking.

Forty minutes. That’s all it takes. Forty minutes of a read receipt with no reply and my entire nervous system has escalated from “he’s probably in a meeting” to “he’s realised I’m too much and this is how it ends.”

I hate this about myself. The neediness of it. The surveillance of it. The way my thumb checks the phone like a tic. The way my chest tightens over something as small as a blue tick.

But I don’t hate myself for it. Not any more. Because this isn’t weakness. It’s wiring. It’s what happens when trust gets broken so many times that your system reclassifies it as dangerous. When love and surveillance were the same thing for so long that one without the other feels incomplete.

He replies. Eventually. Something normal. Something kind. And the seventeen apocalypse scenarios dissolve like they were never there and I feel stupid for having built them and relieved that they were wrong and angry at myself for the whole cycle and already dreading the next time it’ll happen.

Which is probably tomorrow.

I’m working on it. Slowly. In the space between the read receipt and the reply. Learning to breathe in the gap. Learning that gaps are not weapons. Learning that some people just put their phone down.

Some people just put their phone down.

I’m learning.