Signal in the noise

Let me tell you a story.

Most current messaging apps have an incognito mode. Whether you know someone has read a message is up to user settings. You can't fully interpret the gap in time, whether a single second or a vast chasm of no known end. Perhaps a year or two ago, I would say that the psychoanalyzing these gaps was the worst way things could go.

Not quite true. There is someone I have not talked to in a few months. We most recently talked on not great but not distinctly bad terms. 2024 had been rough for both of us. They took a break from a lot of social things because they felt scattered. When we tried to meet up, talk about what was going on, they canceled twice on short notice. I said I couldn't keep making commitments I didn't think were going to happen. The stress is too great. Since then I've send some texts, they're all marked "Read" usually around the time they're sent. Nothing- are we done? I don't know.

The realizations that closed out 2024 and vomited me into 2025 were tough. I am prone to deep loneliness, but I also very raw when it comes to rejection or ambiguous social signals. I have to cut down my social circle, and the people I seek to potentially add, pretty radically. It feels like being strangled, gently but inelegantly. I am loss-averse. Everything, no matter how healthy for my psyche, is considered in terms of it's better to have something than nothing. This isn't true, it never has been. Cards on the table, I need to protect myself. My nature that is up for a variety of things, doesn't have rigid preferences- it doesn't work with the capacity of my heart and the upper range of cortisol in my body.

We would walk tenderly if every trip on the sidewalk was fatal.

Artemis