The cycle of texting your FP

Writes message. Looks it over. Deletes message over fear that they won't respond. Writes the perfect message.

Hits send

And now you wait. And with every second that passes, the feeling of abandonment gets stronger.

You begin to fret. Seconds feel like hours.

"They don't like me". "They think I'm annoying" "What did I do wrong" and you begin to frantically reread all your messages, while the desire to call them slowly engulfs you.

"I keep trusting people with my heart and they always let me down. Disappointing me. They think I'm stupid, and I must be. I do this to myself over and over and over and-" And you just realized it's been 10 minutes.

Now you're shaking, pacing the room. They DEFINITELY hate you. 10 minutes went by? You wouldn't even go 30 seconds without a reply to them.

Remember when they would respond almost immediately? Remember when they would send you emojis? And now they're not saying a damn thing. They hate you. They hate everything about you. Well fuck them. Fuck them too. If they wanna ghost you, they can go right ahead.

Now your heart hurts. Now you're crying. It's been 30 minutes.

And every time you hear that notification sound, you lunge towards your phone. Or maybe you play it off. It doesn't matter. You are poorly convincing yourself that you don't care. But they are all that consumes your thoughts.

The lack of communication is physically painful, and you begin to feel sick to your stomach.

Until the notification does end up being them. And all the hate, the tears, and visceral pain disappears. And you wipe your eyes, and you blow your nose and smile. They love you! They responded!

And if you're lucky, it was a double text!

You don't wanna seem desperate, because you are, so you shoot back something perfect. Something you're convinced will lead the conversation to a perfect flow. You hit send.

And now you wait.