Someone once asked...
Someone answered with kindness...
A young woman once showed me her phone — three hours since she'd sent a message, and she'd already written four different theories about what it meant. I asked her how many of those theories had anything to do with the actual person, and how many were about her own fear of being unwanted. Silence usually isn't a message. It's silence — filled by a phone, a bus ride, a nap, a hundred boring reasons that have nothing to do with you. The anxiety isn't reading their silence. It's reading your own fear into it, and mistaking the reflection for the truth.