mirasoul

Someone reads your message and doesn't reply. The little mark appears, and then nothing.

For a long time that mark was a verdict. Read meant: saw it, chose silence, told you where you stand without the trouble of words. So I'd write again. Something small and easy to answer. Then watch the mark land on that one too, and sit there with it.

I told myself I was being brave. Staying in it. I wasn't. Every follow-up said the same thing under the words: tell me I still matter. I dressed it as care, and it was a bill.

Here's what I learned, slowly, the way you learn the things that matter. Reading and replying are not the same act, and neither one is a measure of love.

People go quiet for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with you. They're emptied out. They don't have the words yet. They're holding something they'd have to say badly or not say at all. A reply costs something, and some nights the cost is more than they've got. That isn't a door closing. It's someone with their hand on the handle, deciding.

The hard part isn't the silence anyway. The hard part is what you want to do about it. Fill it. Ask. Nudge. Anything except sit with a live wire and your own quiet.

So I let it sit now. Not as discipline. Discipline is what I called it for a while, and half those times I was just hiding. Letting it sit means I stop reading every pause as news about my worth. If I've got something real to say, I say it. If I'm writing to check the temperature, I don't. That's the whole test, and it's harder than it sounds.

It runs the other way too, and this is the part I didn't expect. I go quiet. Sometimes because there's nothing. Sometimes because I'm avoiding, and I call it nothing. I can't always tell the two apart from the inside. I don't think anyone can. Everyone thinks their own silence is clean.

The mark says they read it. It doesn't say anything else. I stopped making it say more.