The phone didn’t ring that night. It sat there on the bedside table, cold and indifferent, a small rectangle of silence pressing into my skin like ice. I stared at it—willing it to buzz, to crack the stillness with a message, a call, a sign. But it stayed mute. The absence of her words echoed louder than any heartbreak I’ve ever known, loud enough to drown out my own voice tangled in the dark.
I remember the way her hand felt in mine that night. Somehow, amidst a whirlwind of new conversations and hesitant smiles, that touch grounded me. It was a promise disguised as a fleeting moment—warm, real, electric. The scent of her, like rain on dry earth, clung to the borrowed scarf I wore. Sunday mornings had become a soft kind of sunlight draped over the kitchen floor, the kind that slips in slowly and stays without asking. Laughter spilled from our lips when we talked about everything and nothing, our secrets weaving between the spaces of our breath. We vibed, in the purest sense. Or so I thought.
But the next day, the space between us grew vast and hollow. The texts stopped coming. Seconds bled into minutes, and then into hours, until finally, I was swallowed by the dark silence she left behind. The knot in my stomach twisted like a storm. I felt myself spiraling with a voice I didn’t want—the voice inside that tells you, what if you’re too much? What if you asked for too much? That voice that leaps to the worst when nothing is said at all. So, I wrote. I poured my fear into a message, every anxious thought dancing on the edge of desperation, begging for clarity, for a truth that wouldn’t come.
“I guess my question was if I could just get some clarity why I was ghosted… we held hands when we went out and talked the whole time… I thought we vibed really well” The words spilled and waited, trembling on the line between honest and too much. When she finally answered, she told me why she pulled away, why she didn’t text back, but mostly that she didn’t want to see me like that. The worry, the chasing, the need for explanation after only one date—too intense, too soon.
I tried to apologize, to explain, but my messages floated away, unanswered, as if I had already vanished from her world. And in the silence that followed, I could hear every corner of myself breaking, the same pattern ringing clear: overthinking, anxiety, self-sabotage.
Sometimes I wonder if I did ruin it. If I let the noise inside me drown the quiet hope we built in those fragile days. Was I just too much? Or was she just not the right person to hold my breaking hands? Maybe it wasn’t a matter of what I did, but who she was, or maybe who she couldn’t be. I’m left with the ache of unanswered questions, the sting of being erased without a goodbye, and the hollow weight of trying to convince myself to be better—to be quieter, calmer, less me.
But here’s what the dark whispers back to me late at night—maybe loving yourself enough means talking through the silence, even when it’s hard. Maybe it means carrying the parts of yourself that are messy and loud because without them, there’s nothing left to hold on to. I don’t have all the answers, and no, it’s not perfect. But I’m learning that some stories don’t end with closure. They end with truth, raw and jagged, shining through the cracks we didn’t mean to make. And in that truth—there is a kind of freedom that no silence can steal.