The Purgatory of Pending: What Happens When Life Won't Load

A survival guide for everyone who's ever refreshed an inbox like it was a Magic 8 Ball

Your nervous system has been holding its breath for six days waiting for a text message, your amygdala has started a true crime podcast about your love life called “Serial Ghosters,” and somewhere between “they’re definitely ghosting me” and “what if they died in a very localized natural disaster that only affected their thumbs,” you’ve lost the ability to taste food, sleep through the night, or remember why you wanted this person in the first place.

You’ve refreshed your inbox 46 times since breakfast. You’ve constructed elaborate theories about why they haven’t responded that would make QAnon look like reasonable journalism. You’ve checked if maybe your phone is broken, if maybe THEIR phone is broken, if maybe the entire global telecommunications infrastructure collapsed but only for messages addressed to you specifically. You’ve googled “how long until a text is considered ghosting” and the answer was “it depends” which is the WORST possible answer, worse than rejection, worse than …