When the One You Love Does Not Reply by Ciara Alfaro
In her essay “When the One You Love Does Not Reply” Ciara Alfaro writes eloquently of how cell phone use complicates her romantic life and becomes part of her anxiety about her relationships. From her first cell phone, a flip phone, the thirteen-year-old narrator struggles to moderate her use of texting to her boyfriend. Texts become “a message in a bottle” and a “proof of life,” their symbolic value far beyond the words exchanged. And when messages are not responded to in a timely manner, anxiety and self-doubt ensue.
Inevitably, that first relationship ends, but the phone use does not, and the narrator moves through college and then graduate-school romances and finds her phone use continuing to be a lifeline and a crutch, alternately soothing and enhancing her anxiety. The pandemic, she tells us, “turned my phone from a siren who called to me every hour or so into a full-blown addiction.”
In her author’s note, Alfaro writes how the process of crafting her essay revived some of the anxiety detailed in the piece and how she used that anxiety and her somatic responses to it to uncover some of the essential metaphors of the piece. “Patterns aligned until I arrived at that moment where my texts became messages in a bottle,” she says. Other metaphors of beaches, cliffs, waves and undertows enliven the description.
The creation of elegant and fitting metaphors is tricky. In her craft book The Making of a Story Alice LaPlante writes: “Metaphors tend to be organic—they must grow out of the story itself.” She also writes: “A good metaphor gives us a little shock: it stretches our imagination by forcing us to see something in a new light, yet it also immediately convinces us that it is true.” Alfaro’s metaphor of texts to a loved one as messages in a bottle waiting to be found carries that conviction of truth.
By the end of the essay, the narrator has grown, has learned coping mechanisms, has become more self-aware. As she looks at the bigger picture, the messages in a bottle from her youth now become messages of hope. Alfaro has written a moving essay about a young woman learning to manage her anxiety and the technology that contributes to it. —CRAFT
I first experienced the pitfall of a slow reply with my boyfriend D. We were thirteen. After seventh period let out and we went home for the evening, we would text all night on our pre-iPhones. Mine was a Virgin Mobile Kyocera Switchback—an ugly little phone with a built-in carabiner, the tiniest keypad you’ve ever seen, and a screen that flipped open like a clamshell.
At school, there was little purpose for the phones. We had nothing to say that could not be uttered during passing periods or scribbled on sheets of notebook paper. But once we parted ways for the day, D and I would crick our necks down, exercising our thumbs on our cell phones during our respective car rides home, whilst falling through the front door, in between shower steps, and at the kitchen counter while completing homework before our parents came home from work. We were separate but always together.
This was 2010. My relationship with the phone and with D were both new. I was learning and feeling and experiencing the electric potential of a cell phone for the first time. After three years of having the little machine, I had someone to text other than my brother. Suddenly the way girls at the mall and in movies bedazzled their flip phones made sense to me. It was true adoration—someone out there with a collection of messages in a bottle, waiting for my next sign of life to wash ashore.
This, naturally, was when adoration was peachy. I had no way of knowing it then, but my relationship with D had a six-month timer strapped to its back. It had already started ticking.
The first tiny sign of alarm arose when D began to reply to texts more slowly. At first, I assumed he was busy. We were preteens at the mercy of our parents’ schedules. Put away the phone, my parents rarely, but occasionally, taught me. I assumed D’s parents had similar protocols. I would not hear from him for a couple of hours.
In these spaces, I missed him with an open heart. I would put down the phone and go find busy. Walking the Jack Russell in the rattlesnake dusk, flipping through the TiVo for a story past me had bottled up, helping Mom shred mountains of Colby Jack cheese that sat as fluffy temptations on the countertop.
Once I found out that other girls had crushes on D and suspected he had crushes on them back, the chasms between texts felt more sinister. My imagination would light a match and throw it to the bottom of the silent, Devil-terrained cliff. I envisioned snakes wrapping around his heart and flipping it away from me. I heard campsite whispers glide through the night air; his friends and my friends, telling him I was ugly, undateable, a fool in this prank relationship. I felt peppery embers hit my skin, reminding me that this was my only time to be loved, and I blew it by not being entertaining enough.
I grew frantic trying to distract myself from these possibilities. I hid my phone beneath my pillow—or, a more advanced technique: inside the pillowcase. I forced as much distance between me and the little machine as possible. When that didn’t work, I texted other friends, seeking validation that my texts were still functioning and that I still existed. I reread old messages, running my fingertips over last week’s limerence, studying the girl I was back when I was remembered.
Then: he’d text me. He was at basketball practice, dinner, with friends, doing nothing at all. He’d fallen asleep. I could finally breathe. How silly I’d been, to think love was a hose that could run out of water.
Then: silence. Thirsty snakes. Siren songs pulling my body towards the phone tucked beneath my mattress.
Then, one day, six months expired: that text. A hose out of water.
By the time high school was over, I mastered this routine. I learned all of the tricks. The long and short of them all was to turn off the phone and get busy with anything else (my personal favorite salve: locking myself inside the movie theater).
In college, the stakes were raised. I attended a small liberal arts college in Upstate New York. The school was on a hill, three to four flights from home, inside a tiny village, on a campus that felt as if it could fit on the tip of a ballpoint pen. My mental health was a precarious boat on which I ran from one side of the deck to the other, balancing against capsizing each day. I did not want to date in this place. I knew my tendency toward romantic swings could only be catastrophic. But, of course, the dates found me, and how could I say no with a self-esteem like that?
I fell next-to in love with a guy from my Shakespeare class. We laughed and played and spoke serious on the phone and behind closed doors. I lost my virginity. The phone grew quiet. He sat next to me in class, ignored me on the walk home, hooked up with girls prettier than me. Like a true ghost, he never spoke a word about closure.
I learned the curve of ghosting, adjusted my rules and expectations. The stakes rose.
The next year, I walked into a situationship with his best friend, something akin to the relationship described in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. This person was my first queer partner. They had already graduated and were living four hours away in the City. We texted all day, every day, love-flushed despite the distance. Some days, they woke up and screamed at me on the phone for not texting back fast enough the night before. Some weeks, they woke up and decided that I had earned the silent treatment. They loved me one moment and hated me the next.
The silences between their texts grew knived teeth under the blades of which I became afraid. I obsessed over every possible mistake I could’ve made, every misunderstanding I could’ve created, every text I’d ever sent that could be extracted for extortion later. They had warned me early in the relationship that they never deleted texts. At the time, I thought they meant they were sentimental. It was only months into the relationship that I realized this comment had been a threat.
I felt that old, familiar humiliation when their best friend ghosted me. Now, I watched every sinister fear learn to climb up the Deviled cliff and run after me.
When I saw the black screen of my phone light up bright, I found it hard to breathe. I suffered from panic attacks and did not sleep. I felt hollow, afraid that I was the worst person alive. In my bones, I practiced for scenarios in which this ex would follow me into my future, find every person I knew, and convince them against loving me.
This was how I spent my senior year.
A year into recovery from whatever that relationship was came the pandemic. The same as most everybody, this time turned my phone from a siren who called to me every hour or so into a full-blown addiction. I had moved to a new city for grad school, but I hardly knew anyone. I was alone, always moments away from texting a friend or family member right back. I became fatigued by the screens I bounced between, but still, I became incapable of leaving the house without my little machine. I grew paranoid that I would get into a car accident, be kidnapped by the men who honked at me on my walks, or slip on Minnesota ice and break my back. Any accident could turn into a certain death without a way to call for help.
Though everyone I knew was states away and I was awaiting messages from no one in particular, the phone became my reminder that I wasn’t totally alone out in the world. I was plugged into the rapidly shifting news, to my parents and grandmothers growing older, to the parasocial people who talked to me from beneath the screen. The phone became proof of my humanity.
Back in elementary school, I had a frightening computer teacher. She had icy-blue eyes and a mean gaze. While we learned to type, she snapped the air with her voice: Wrists up! She shook her head when our wrists fell. You are all going to have Carpal Tunnel by the time you turn twenty-five. When she said this, I lifted my wrists like zombie arms once again, worried for my older self.
Even then, I knew everything was a trade-off. You always sacrificed one comfort for another.
The number of times the phone has stiffened my body—tightening my forearms, collapsing my neck, burning my damaged pupils, shoving noise into my ears and stress into my chest—is too many to possibly count.
The week I am writing to you, I am coming from an unstable time. The semester just ended and I don’t have another teaching gig lined up. My book is in a state of Will You or Won’t You Ever Actually Exist. The NEA is being taken over by fascists. My partner and I are in our last stretch of long-distance relationshipping before moving in together later this summer. I miss my students already. There are wasps building nests inside my window panes. I am a true baby when it comes to change.
To put it cutely, I have been in a state of crashing out. Crying, not sleeping, executive dysfunctioning. This past Saturday, my partner texted me at 9 a.m., and I didn’t hear from her for the rest of the day. We have a sweet relationship, inside which I have learned, for the first time, what it means to trust someone to choose you day by day. The way we text is well-balanced, pinging each other casually every few hours. But not hearing from her all day without explanation was abnormal.
By 7 p.m., the mean thoughts arrived. Maybe she met someone and realized she liked them better.
I shook the thought from my head. I didn’t actually believe this, but it was an instinctual story my body was used to reaching for. I made a Mediterranean salad, went for a walk, and calmed my brain.
Then, 9 p.m. came. I texted her, R u alive?? I plugged my phone into the bedroom charger. I moved my body to the living room sofa. I balanced my laptop on my knees, searching for apartments, and queued up an old Disney movie.
At 10 p.m., I brought the phone back out. I wondered if hers had shattered or died. Maybe she was still out with friends. Maybe they got arrested. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities.
By eleven, I had started considering the bright white of a hospital. I Googled her local news station and scanned the headlines. I read one that said, Bloomington woman struck and killed while crossing I-494 on Saturday night. I felt bile rise in my throat. I clicked the headline—read about a sixty-six-year-old woman, and felt selfish relief wash over me.
I crawled into bed at midnight. I texted my childhood best friend, I’m being crazy. But you don’t think she’s dead, do you?
Just call her, sweetie, my friend replied.
I was so allegiant to my old rules: play it cool. Be entertaining. Do not come off as insecure.
The rules were stupid. We’d been together nearly two years. She was well aware by this point that I was naturally entertaining, decidedly uncool, and an anxious little creature. I combed the rules from my mind and called her, but there was no answer. I hadn’t heard from her in fifteen hours.
How could I possibly sleep at a time like this?
I was exhausted, wired, desperate, worked up, wide-awake in bed. I finally found a person I deeply trusted, and now she was gone. Everything is a trade-off. The world is harsh and unpredictable.
Then, at 1:30 a.m., she texted me. The day had gotten so busy. She was helping a friend move into a new apartment; they went out for drinks after. She loved me and would text me tomorrow.
I sent her an eye roll emoji. I felt the fire deflate in my chest. I rolled over, trying to find sleep.
In the years leading up to this, death had started happening to me. A member of my family had attempted suicide. A week after their attempt, a friend in my grad program swallowed a bottle full of pills. She designated me as her caretaker; the hospital called, and I spent the night with her. A second friend was struggling. No one was doing well. I had no semblance of boundaries. In moments of stillness, I stared at my phone, worried about everyone I loved.
The undertow kept grabbing my ankles, not letting me catch my breath. A hilarious and bright friend from undergrad got killed in a hit-and-run. My nana died. At my post-MFA job, my favorite coworker said See you tomorrow on Thursday and was gone by Friday.
I had never gotten to know death so intimately before. I’d only ever lost two family dogs and a great-grandfather. I cried, took care of myself, and thought, all things considered, that I was coping extraordinarily well. I did not go to therapy because I was busy tying up the ends of my bills, trying to throw at least some of my debt out the window. I was smart enough to know that I needed therapy and to feel bad about not going.
My wisdom told me: these problems would come back, even louder, later.
I suppose now is later. Somewhere along the sidewalk of time, my anxiety around text silences had turned from a fear of being forgotten to a fear of the people I love dying. I can’t be sure if this feeling I’ve been having is a result of my relationship with the phones, death, or the pandemic’s unspoken ricochets. Probably, it’s a conglomeration of all three.
What I know is that when I texted my childhood best friend in a panic that Saturday night, they told me that they have started to feel the knocks of death anxiety, too. Our friend S suffers from it, as well Surely, so does L. I had no idea this feeling was sitting inside all four of us until I remembered all the people we’ve lost these past few years. The list was longer than I’d ever thought to pay attention to.
If I had told that thirteen-year-old girl pressing her heart up to her phone screen that there were worse fates than being forgotten by a stupid boy, she might not have believed me. But, if I could go back, I would not tell her this because it is important for me to protect her youth.
I would simply say, I get it, baby. Keep learning the tricks. They might just get you through.
It took me two days of being annoyed with F for her shitty Saturday communication before I remembered the time of year it was. I was putting on deodorant in the bathroom when the date pinged in my mind. I hurried across the apartment to stand in front of my calendar. Yes—it was the first weekend of May. My work friend V had died almost exactly a year before.
I am terrible with dates and calendars, but my body has excellent circannual rhythm. My limbic system acts out to get me to notice importance. Like a pulpy mystery, I have to solve why my emotions are acting out. I am grateful for these moments when I am required to check in. I do what I can to stay rational in the face of fear. I go to the movies. I put my phone on Do Not Disturb and take walks. I move my body, then cry on the Peloton bike when my instructor Tunde says, Time is the only currency you will never know the remaining balance of, so use it well.
When the one I love does not reply, I respect my body’s lessons, timers, and needs. I follow my routines. Put down the phone, touch the world. Recite what is in my control and what is out of it.
Honor the rising wave inside me, compassing me to those I will always wait by the shore for. Sit with my collection of empty bottles, writing hope inside every one.
Name them love. Throw them into the unknown. Do it all again.
CIARA ALFARO is a Chicana writer from Lubbock, Texas. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, swamp pink, Passages North, Southeast Review, Witness, and more. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and her BA from Colgate University, where she served as a 2024-25 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow. She currently teaches at the University of Minnesota. Find her on Instagram @ciaraalfaro.
Featured Image by Domingo Alvarez, courtesy of Unsplash.
