"It's like a universal feeling of discontent, isn't it?"

She didn't know how much those simple words, that mere line of text in conjunction with her starring my previous message, meant to me.

"It's like I lost my pen," I wrote. "Like I used to know what I was doing and have fun doing it, but now it's more of a chore, of having to shape it a certain way so to please someone who doesn't care about me, and I suddenly feel unfit, like there's this whole world with worries, and those worries don't even touch me, you know, they have nothing to do with me, and yet I must look at them because it's the right thing to do, and I must study them, and must apply them to what I write, because otherwise no one would care and I'd have nothing new to say because better writers have come before me with better pens and better minds and have already felt the way I'm feeling now, so nobody cares about what I feel—I have to write about what others feel, because all those others have never spoken before. Well, I say, is it my fault I was born too late? If others have already spoken what I'm feeling, does that mean I don't get to speak anymore? So yeah, that's how I feel. Does that make any sense?"

She didn't see the message the ten minutes I waited going in and out of her chat, so I distracted myself with a book, checking my phone every minute. Half an hour later, I returned to her chat: Seen. I quickly exited; she must've just seen it; she must be thinking about what she's going to reply. But another half hour passed in not reading the book, and that Seen was still all I had. I looked with my teeth in my battered lip for the thing I'd written that was so disrespectful she now hated me for it. I rapidly screenshot my message, reread it, analyzed all its problems. There were many, and many reasons not to talk to me anymore. But I thought she was better than that. Maybe she was just busy. I laughed and went on with my day, keeping her in my gut. Later that night she posted a story. My message was still on Seen.