My phone went quiet for a few hours this afternoon. No messages, no alerts, no mentions. I checked it six times in the first thirty minutes. I checked the settings twice to make sure nothing was blocked. Everything was working fine. The world just wasn't reaching out. I sat with that and felt a low-level anxiety that I couldn't really justify, this creeping sense that something was wrong, that I'd been excluded from something, that time was moving somewhere I wasn't.

I thought of all the things I could do with a quiet afternoon and instead I just sat there refreshing, half-waiting. The silence should have been a gift. I treated it like a symptom. The discomfort of not being contacted, of not being needed, of not having something to respond to - it's bigger than I expected it to be. I wonder what that says. When your phone goes quiet, what do you feel? And when did that feeling change from relief to something closer to dread?