I haven’t texted back yet. Not because I don’t want to. Not because I don’t know what to say. Not because I didn’t see your message. I did. I saw it the second it came through. In fact, I saw the notification, saw Jesus for a second, and immediately locked my phone like it had just handed me a court summons.
Because if I don’t read it, if I just let it exist in its little notification bubble, then it’s not real yet, right? Like Schrödinger’s Text?
Because something in my brain, some ancient, lizard-brained, malfunctioning part of me, has decided that responding to a text message is an impossible task. Like, full physical aversion to the act of typing. Like my thumbs forget how to function. Like my nervous system straight-up rejects the concept of communication.
(But no, yeah, let’s totally send people to Mars when I can’t even tell you what I had for breakfast without undergoing a full psychological collapse.)
And then the waiting starts. Not my waiting. Your waiting. Which I am now aware of. Which is now a burden on my soul. Which is now a rapidly expanding hole in my conscience because I know you saw that I didn’t answer and now you’re thinking about it. Or maybe you’re not thinking about it. Maybe you’re just going about your day, completely unbothered, while I am sitting here like an abandoned IKEA shelf missing three screws and the tiny allen wrench, self-destructing over my own inability to function like a human being.
And now it’s been too long. Now if I text back, it’s weird. Now it means something that I took this long. Now I have to acknowledge the delay in some way, but if I do that, it draws even more attention to the delay, and now this casual, meaningless interaction has become a monument to my inability to be a normal person.
So instead of fixing it, instead of just sending a normal text like a normal person, what do I do? I let it sit. I let it rot. I let the time gap grow so large that when I do finally text back, it’ll be so ridiculously, absurdly late that it’ll circle back around to being comedy. Like, oh, you texted me a week ago? Haha, yeah, well surprise, bitch, I was in a coma (I wasn’t). Or maybe I got drafted into a secret space mission (I didn’t). Or maybe—MAYBE—I simply needed the perfect combination of planetary alignments, mood lighting, and emotional fortitude to type out a text that says “haha yeah.”
Anyway, yeah, my bad. What’s up?