A delayed reply can still rearrange my whole afternoon

Dear Delyara, Not because I’m dramatic. Because silence fills too quickly in me. I know people get busy. I know life interrupts. I know a phone left in another room should not become a personality crisis inside my nervous system. But if I’m already even slightly low, uncertainty breeds immediately. Maybe I said too much. Maybe I misjudged the closeness. Maybe the tone changed. Maybe, maybe, maybe. By the time the reply comes — usually ordinary, often kind, always far less emotionally loaded than my body made it — I have already spent too much of the day living in a forecast that never really happened. Anxiety is expensive that way. It charges before the event.