Look at him, thumb hovering over the send button like it's the detonator to his entire social existence. The text reads: "Hey, sorry I've been quiet. Hope you're doing well." Nine words. He's rewritten it forty-three times.

Pathetic, he decides, deleting it again. Two weeks of silence and this is what I came up with? She probably assumes I've forgotten she exists. Or worse—that I never cared to begin with.

Ah, there it is. The magnificent theater opening in his mind, curtains drawn back to reveal the grand stage where everyone he's ever known performs elaborate soliloquies about his failures. Center stage: Anna, the friend he hasn't called in two weeks, delivering a heartbroken monologue about his indifference.

"I thought we were close," his imagined Anna weeps to an imagined audience of mutual friends. "But he just... disappeared. I keep checking my phone, wondering if I did something wrong. The silence says everything, doesn't it? I'm obviously not worth his time."

The narrator wants to laugh—would laugh, if it weren't so brutally pathetic. Here he sits, chest tight with genuine longing to reconnect, crafting elaborate grief operas starring people who are probably eating cereal and barely thinking about him at all. His empathy, that double-edged gift, has become a torture device of his own design.

But wait, there's more. Because in his theater, the other friends have noticed too.

"He's always been like that!," imagined-Mike tells imagined-David. "He didn’t show up to my birthday last year… Some friend. We should stop trying."

The beautiful irony, lost on our protagonist but crystal clear to anyone with functioning perspective: his terror of being judged as uncaring has made him appear exactly that. The feedback loop spins with mechanical precision—fear creates avoidance, avoidance creates evidence, evidence validates fear.

He deletes the text. Again.

What's the point? he thinks, setting the phone down. The damage is done. I've already proven I'm the kind of person who vanishes when things get real.

Meanwhile, in actual reality—that quaint little dimension he rarely visits—Anna is debugging code at her kitchen table, wondering absently if she should text him about the funny meme she saw. Mike is arguing with his sister about whose turn it is to do dishes. David forgot he exists entirely.

But in his mind's theater, they're all starring in his absence. Every person he's ever disappointed has front-row seats to his failures, every relationship he's fumbled becomes evidence in the case against his character. He's prosecutor, defendant, and jury in a trial that exists nowhere but in the echo of his own skull.

The phone buzzes. A text from his coworker: "Great job on the presentation today. Really saved our asses."

He stares at it, immediately constructing the subtext. They're probably just being polite. I looked terrified up there—everyone could tell I was panicking inside.

Cut to his mental theater, where his coworkers discuss his performance:

"Did you see how he was shaking? The poor guy looked like he wanted to disappear. We should probably say something nice to make him feel better."

The narrator observes this particular delusion with something approaching awe. Here's genuine praise—the kind he desperately craves—and he's twisting it into evidence of his inadequacy. His emotional intelligence, supposedly his superpower, has become a funhouse mirror that reflects every kindness as condescension, every gesture as manipulation.

"Thanks," he types back. Nothing more. Can't risk seeming too eager, too grateful, too anything. Better to appear ungracious than vulnerable.

And so the cycle continues.

In his theater, the audience never stops watching, never stops judging, never stops finding him wanting. The tragic comedy of it all: he's created the very rejection he fears, scripted every abandonment, directed every disappointed exit.

The phone buzzes again. Anna: "Miss hanging out. You free this weekend?"

His heart leaps—actually leaps, like some ridiculous romantic comedy protagonist. But before the joy can fully land…

She's probably bored. Or her other friends are busy. This is pity-coffee, obligation-coffee. She'll sit there checking her phone, counting the minutes until she can politely escape.

He pictures it all: her forced smile, her obvious relief when he suggests they wrap up, her post-coffee debrief with someone who actually matters to her: "He's so... distant. I tried, but it's like talking to a wall. I won't make that mistake again."

"Can't this weekend, work stuff," he types.

The lie comes so easily now. Easier than risking the confirmation of his imagined narrative. Easier than discovering whether she actually wants to see him or just feels obligated to ask.

But here's what makes him truly pitiable, what makes the narrator almost—almost—feel sympathy for this self-sabotaging fool: somewhere beneath all that manufactured drama, all those elaborate assumptions, he knows he's doing it. He knows he's choosing fear over possibility, knows he's writing scripts for people who haven't auditioned for his personal tragedy.

He knows, and he does it anyway.

Because the theater of assumptions, for all its pain, offers one crucial comfort: control. In his imagined rejections, he knows exactly what to expect. In his scripted disappointments, there are no surprises, no genuine vulnerabilities, no real risks.

The actual Anna might like him. Might miss him. Might be sitting in her own apartment, wondering why he keeps pulling away just when things feel real.

But that Anna—the real one—exists outside his theater, in that terrifying realm where outcomes aren't predetermined and his assumptions might be wrong.

And he'd rather be right about being unwanted than risk being wrong about being loved.