By the time he replied to my message about a movie, I had already unfollowed him and removed him from my followers. He had been quiet for two days. I had taken that silence as the end of something we had barely started.
He said he had been busy and had disconnected from everything. I explained that I thought he had ghosted me. There it was: his account of being offline, and the small ending I had arranged without asking him whether we were having one.
I'm 21, and he's 29. We'd only been talking for a few days before I started getting attached. Not simply looking forward to another message. I was thinking about him, imagining a future, answering quickly and sharing more about myself than the length of our acquaintance really accounted for. I wanted to know everything about him while we were still finding out the basics.
That speed is familiar to me, even though the romantic part is newer. At school, I could act distant with friends, as though the friendship didn't matter very much. Then we changed schools and went separate ways, and suddenly those same people felt irreplaceable. Making new friends seemed almost disloyal. It took years before I felt comfortable letting other people into my life, and even then I could begin by acting as if I didn't care.
With men I might date, I seem to reach the attached part much sooner. The distance is something I try to perform while I'm already involved. I want to seem relaxed, so I pay attention to how a relaxed person might behave. Meanwhile, I'm checking my messages and wondering whether I've said the wrong thing.
I don't want to turn texting into a contest. If a man takes three hours to answer, I don't believe I need to wait three hours too. Replying quickly feels natural when I want to talk to him. But then I worry that being straightforward about my interest makes me look needy, and an ordinary reply starts carrying the extra job of proving that I'm not.
The movie message wasn't a demand for anything. He'd mentioned a film he was going to watch, and I asked how it was. When he disappeared, I didn't send another message or ask him to explain himself. From his side, there may have been nothing to see. From mine, I was trying to work out whether he didn't want to talk anymore.
Unfollowing him was the part I actually did. I couldn't make him answer, and I didn't know what the silence meant, but I could remove the connection on my phone. It was a real action taken on an assumption. His eventual explanation didn't erase that difference, even if it was a relief to hear that he hadn't meant to disappear on me.
I still don't know how this connection will develop. His reply answered why he had been absent; it didn't tell me how close we were or what would happen next. We'd only just begun talking. Yet by the time he came back, I had already imagined a future with him and then acted as though he'd ended it. Now he had replied to my message, and I was explaining why I'd removed him.
