I want to lay this out clearly, because even now it strikes me as a little unbelievable: in the four months we were in contact, he never once, before I had replied, sent two messages in a row. Not once. Not the kind of “oh, and also—” follow-up, not a link he thought of later, not a “never mind, forget I asked.” Nothing. He would send one message, and then he would wait; if I did not reply, the next time I heard from him would be a day or two later, an entirely new subject, with not a word about the previous message that had gone unanswered.
The first time I noticed, I assumed it was politeness. The second time, I thought it was deliberate. By the fifth time, I was half losing my mind. The moment I saw a message from him, something would catch in my chest — a faint tightening I was not exactly eager to admit. Sometimes I would deliberately hold off on replying, just to see whether he would chase. He never chased. And it was precisely the fact that he never chased that made me want to reply faster. If this was a tactic, it was the most understated tactic I had ever seen.
I kept circling back to the same logic: a man does not chase either because he is not interested, or because he is confident enough not to need to. And everything else about him — when he was there, he was genuinely there — argued that it was not indifference. Which left only the other possibility. I said this to a friend, and she said, “That is just having boundaries, no?” I said, logically, yes, but it did not feel like boundaries, it felt like strategy. She said maybe it was both. I wanted to argue, and I could not.
What it did to me is a little embarrassing to say out loud: it made every conversation feel like an event. When you know the other person will not add anything more, each exchange takes on a sense of completeness — a line was said, you replied, that was real, and then there was silence. None of that midnight scroll where someone picks up their phone and flings a string of stray thoughts at you. I found myself rereading our conversations over and over, hunting for what he actually meant, hunting for the seam between what was said and what was left unsaid.