She said "be right back" at 2:37 PM on a Tuesday.
It's 11:12 PM on Sunday and I'm still waiting.
It's not that I stare at my phone all the time. I look. I stop. I do other things. I eat, I work, I pretend I'm paying attention when my friends talk. But there's a part of my brain that never shuts off, that keeps monitoring that green icon that used to always be lit next to her name.
Now it's gray. Offline for 4 days, 8 hours, and 35 minutes.
We talked every day for eight months. Every. Single. Day. Good morning at 7 AM, good night after midnight. Coffee photos, bad memes, five-minute voice notes about nothing. She told me about the boss she hated, I told her about my project that never got off the ground. We planned to meet "when things calm down."
Things never calm down.
I should have insisted more. I should have bought that ticket when she casually suggested, "it would be nice if you came in March." I laughed, said "maybe," as if we had all the time in the world. As if people don't just disappear simply because they can.
The last conversation was normal. Absolutely normal. She complained about traffic, I sent a SpongeBob gif, she laughed with that "kkkkkk" I could hear in my head. Three messages later, she sent a photo of her lunch — something with chicken and sweet potatoes, because she was in that "eating better" phase. I joked that it looked like hospital food. She sent a middle finger emoji.
Then came the "be right back, gotta take care of something."
I replied "ok" with a thumbs-up emoji.
That was the last thing I ever said to her.
For the first two days, I thought it was her phone. Maybe it broke. Maybe she lost it. I messaged her on Instagram — seen at 7:23 PM, no reply. Messaged her on the secondary WhatsApp she barely used — two read receipts at different times, nothing. I tried calling three times. Voicemail every time, that robotic voice reminding you that you're insignificant enough not to deserve an answer.
On the third day, I saw that she had posted stories.
She was at a bar. That place with exposed brick walls and warm lighting that makes everyone look better than they actually are. She was wearing a dress I'd never seen before — black, thin straps. A drink in her hand, something colorful with a striped straw. In the second story, she was laughing at something someone off-camera had said. That open-mouth, head-thrown-back laugh I knew only from audio.
The third story was a group selfie. Her in the middle, two guys and a girl. Everyone too good-looking, too happy, existing perfectly without me.
That's when I understood.
It wasn't the phone. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't a family emergency or a kidnapping or an induced coma or any of the catastrophic scenarios I'd built in my head at three in the morning, when desperation makes you creative.
She had just decided to stop talking to me.
No explanation. No fight. No "we need to talk," which at least gives you the dignity of closure. Just that planned, surgical silence that leaves you stuck in a limbo where you don't know whether to be angry, worried, or just accept that you never mattered as much as you thought you did.
I keep thinking about what I did.
Seriously. I spent hours on this. I reviewed every conversation from the past week like a police investigator looking for evidence. Saved screenshots. Analyzed tone. Counted how many emojis she used per message — had they decreased? Was she taking longer to reply? Were the answers shorter, drier, more "I'm busy"?
There was that voice note on Tuesday morning where I complained about work for four straight minutes. Was that it? Did I talk too much about myself? But she always said she liked listening to me. Or did she just say that because that's what polite people say?
There was that time, two weeks ago, when I didn't reply for about five hours because I was dealing with a problem at work. When I got back, she had sent three messages — nothing serious, just random things about her day. I replied normally. But did she get upset? Was that the beginning?
Or was it earlier? That day I canceled the video call because I was feeling ugly, tired, not in the mood to perform attention. I said it was because the internet was bad. Did she believe me? Or did she realize I was lying and that was the last straw?
The more I look, the more I find. More mistakes. More moments where I could have been better, more present, more interesting, more something that would have made her not want to disappear.
My friends say I'm obsessed.
"Man, if she wanted to talk to you, she would. Simple as that."
Lucas said that yesterday, while we were watching a game I wasn't really watching. He was annoyed because I checked my phone every thirty seconds.
"You're giving way too much importance to someone who doesn't even respect you."
As if respect were something you could just turn off. As if eight months of daily intimacy were as disposable as spam in your inbox.
"She's not worth your peace, dude."
But what he doesn't understand — what nobody understands — is that it's not about whether she's worth it or not. It's about me needing to know why. Because that's what ghosting is: leaving you with a hundred questions and no answers, forcing you to create narratives in your own head until you don't know what's real anymore.
Did she meet someone else?
Did she never really like me and was just killing time?
Is there something wrong with me that everyone sees except me?
Did she die and nobody told me?
That last thought still shows up sometimes. Usually around four in the morning, when I wake up alone and remember she didn't send good morning. I check her social media, looking for signs of life. A like, a comment, anything.
There always is.
She's alive. She's just dead to me.
The worst part isn't even the silence. The worst part is that I keep writing messages to her in my head. I keep saving things to tell her. I saw a dog just like hers on the street yesterday — a golden retriever with that goofy face she loved. My first instinct was to take a picture. I stopped mid-motion, phone in my hand, and remembered.
She doesn't want to know about the dog.
She doesn't want to know about anything.
I delete messages before sending them now. I write, reread, hold my finger over the delete button until everything disappears. I've done this about fifteen times in the last five days.
"Hey, are you okay? I was worried."
Delete.
"Look, if I did something wrong, tell me. We can fix it."
Delete.
"You owe me at least an explanation after eight months."
Delete.
"Please."
Delete.
It's like therapy. Like mourning someone who's still alive, just not alive to you. It's worse than a normal breakup, because a breakup has that moment, you know? That conversation. As much as it hurts, at least you know it's over. You can start processing.
But this? This is being frozen in the "be right back." Eternally waiting for someone who already left without saying goodbye.
Sometimes I imagine she'll message me months from now.
"Hey, sorry for disappearing like that. I was going through some stuff."
And I don't know what would be worse: her coming back with a weak excuse or her coming back with no excuse at all, like nothing happened, as if I hadn't spent weeks falling apart into theories and self-sabotage and Google searches like "why do people disappear without explanation."
I don't know if I would reply.
I know I would.
Probably immediately. Probably something pathetic like "hey, it's so good to see you back" with three exclamation points and a smiling emoji, because I'm exactly the kind of person who forgives people who never apologized.
My therapist — I started going because of this, by the way — says we build narratives about people based on crumbs of attention. That eight months of messages are not the same thing as eight months of real presence. That I fell in love with an edited version, with texts without context, with emotional availability without consequence.
"You built a person in your head using the materials she gave you. But construction is not the same thing as reality."
She said that in the last session, while I cried in a way I hadn't cried in I don't even know how long. The kind of cry that comes from being exhausted from carrying alone a weight that should have been shared.
"And you need to accept that the person you knew may never have existed. At least not the way you needed her to."
She's probably right.
But that doesn't change the fact that, for eight months, that edited version was the best part of my day. It doesn't change the fact that I woke up excited to see her message. It doesn't change the fact that she knew things about me that friends of years don't know. It doesn't change the fact that I planned a future with someone who doesn't even have the decency to say "I don't want to talk to you anymore."
There's one message I wrote and haven't deleted yet.
It's been sitting in drafts for two days. I open it, read it, close it. Open it, read it, close it.
"Do you know what's worse than breaking up? Not breaking up. Leaving me here waiting, making excuses for you in my head because I need to believe you're not the kind of person who does this. But you are. You're exactly the kind of person who does this. And I'm the idiot still writing messages I'll never send to someone who will never reply again."
I'm not going to send it.
But I can't delete it either.
It's 11:47 PM now. The phone is in my hand, too heavy for such a small object. I'm going to turn it off. Take a shower. Go to sleep. Tomorrow I'll wake up and I won't check if she came back. I'll give it some time. A week. A month. Whatever it takes for me to stop feeling that tightness in my chest every time a notification arrives and it's not her.
I'm lying.
I'll check tomorrow morning.
At 7:03, like always.
And on Tuesday, at the exact time she said "be right back."
And on every Tuesday that comes after, because a part of me still believes she'll come back with some explanation, something that makes everything make sense, that turns this abandonment into a misunderstanding.
But another part of me — the part that's slowly growing, the part my therapist is trying to feed — already knows the truth.
She's not coming back.
And if she does, she won't be the same person who said "be right back" on some random Tuesday.
Because someone who does this to another person was never who I thought they were to begin with.
And me?
I was never as important as I needed to believe I was.