The turn doesn't exist

The second part of the method deals with the stretch that has no open message in it. The friend who sent the last one, or the one where nobody can remember, or the one where you've told yourself it's their go. Chapter 5 said the turn was a fiction. This chapter says what to do instead of keeping it.

Reply or start, regardless. If there's an open message, it's yours. If there isn't, and the person's crossed your mind, that's yours too. There's no third state in which it's correctly theirs and you're correctly waiting. The count is abandoned, not settled.

The line without news. The message that starts a stretch closing doesn't need a reason. This is the part people find hardest, because a message with no news in it feels like it needs a purpose, and the purpose becomes the catch-up, and the catch-up needs an afternoon. It doesn't need a purpose. "Passed the place we used to go and thought of you. How's things?" The earlier book Say the good thing out loud is about the message that carries a good thought and nothing else, and it fits here exactly. The thought is the reason. It's enough.

Same rule, same size. Two lines, today, from the queue. The line without news is if anything shorter than the reply, because there's nothing to answer. Its whole job is to exist and to end with a question, so that the next thing is theirs and a conversation has started.

What to expect. Most will answer, some quickly, some with a line that begins "I was just thinking about you", which is the turn from their side and tells you they'd been keeping it too. A few won't, and chapter 23 is about them. None will think it strange, because by chapter 6 the strangeness was yours.

The earlier book Ring them first has a rule for the thought that crosses your mind, get in touch that day, and it's aimed at the reader for whom nobody's writing at all. If that's nearer your situation than this book's, go there. Here the point is narrower. The turn is the reason you've given for the stretches without a message in them, and it's the only reason in this book that was never doing anything for you. Give it up and the stretches are just stretches, and a stretch ends with a line.