The Text That Didn’t Come Back

You sent it at 2:14. Nothing dramatic. Just a question about Saturday.

By 2:40 you’d checked your phone four times. By 3:15 you were fairly sure you’d done something wrong, though you couldn’t say what. You scrolled back through the last few messages looking for the moment you’d offended somebody, the way you’d search a room for keys you were sure you’d set down somewhere.

By 4:00 you’d built a small, complete story. They were annoyed with you. Probably about the thing you said last week that you’d already half forgotten. You started rehearsing what you’d say when they finally responded, some version of an apology for a crime you weren’t sure had happened.

At 4:52 your phone buzzed. “Sorry, was in back to back meetings all day! Saturday works great.”

You read it twice. Nothing was wrong. Nobody was upset. There was no apology owed, no crime, no story. Just a person who was busy, exactly the way you are busy sometimes, exactly the way you’d want the benefit of the doubt if the roles were reversed.

You put the phone down. Somewhere in the last three hours you’d written an entire quiet drama, cast yourself as the person who ruined something, and performed it for an audience of one.

The room hadn’t changed. Only your reading of it had.

If you’ve spent an afternoon writing a story nobody else was in, you’re not the only one. Rick Novak writes about these patterns and how people learn to catch them. Find his work at ricknovakauthor.com.