"It's their turn"

Somewhere in the stretch, the turn appears. You look at the open message and a thought surfaces that isn't quite a reason but works like one. They didn't reply to my last one for ages either. Or they never suggested a date after we said we'd meet. Or I did the last two. It isn't said out loud and it isn't held with much conviction. But it's there, and it makes tonight's silence feel like fairness instead of delay.

Look at what the turn is. A conversation between friends isn't a game with turns. Nobody's counting, and if somebody is, the count is always wrong, because each person remembers their own messages and forgets the other's. What the turn actually is, I think, is the delay dressed up. You've left a message for a week and something in you needs the week to have been reasonable, and "their turn" supplies that. It's a reason found after the fact for a silence that happened for no reason at all.

The trouble is that it works at both ends. Your friend, looking at their own phone, also has a turn. Theirs says that they sent the last message and it's been a fortnight, so it's yours. Both of you are right by your own count, and both counts leave the message open. Two people each waiting for the other's go is how a friendship falls silent without either of them ever deciding to let it, and each of them, if asked, would say the other one went quiet.

The earlier book Ring them first is about the version of this where the waiting has settled in for good, where nobody rings and the reader has stopped expecting anyone to, and it deals with the turn at length. This book is about the earlier stage, where you still have the friends and the messages still arrive. At this stage the turn is easier to give up, because you can see what it's doing. It's the only belief in this book that's doing nothing for you at all. It doesn't save time. It doesn't promise a better reply. It just makes silence feel fair.

So drop it. Not by deciding to be the bigger person, which is the turn under another name. Just notice that the question "whose go is it" has no answer and never did, and that the only thing it's ever done is keep a message open. If a message is open, it's yours. If there's no message and you've thought of the person, that's yours too. The count is nobody's business, including yours.