My daughter is fourteen and the phone in her hand is ruining her afternoon.
Someone hasn't texted back. I know this because she has stopped moving. She checks the screen, locks it, sets it face-down on the counter, and then turns it back over eight seconds later to confirm the same nothing is still there. The little word at the bottom says the message was seen.
That's the whole wound. Seen, and no reply. She is doing the math on it, the way you do math on silence, filling the gap with the worst available answer.
I want to tell her the gap is almost never what she thinks. But I'm not sure she'd hear it, and anyway I understand the ache better than she'd guess.
Up there, the loudest thing is how quiet it is. You look back at the planet and you can hold it out at arm's length, the whole thing, everyone who has ever lived, hanging in a black that does not care whether you reply or not. The air we breathe is a film thinner than the skin on an apple. Everything that has ever spoken to anything else spoke inside that film.
So I don't think her worry is silly. Somewhere down there is another kid who read her words and is scared to answer, and the whole radius of the universe that contains anyone capable of reading them at all is a bright blue sliver you could smudge with a thumb.
I put my hand on her shoulder. She flinches, then doesn't.
The phone stays dark on the counter, and for a minute she lets it.