Describe a time when you sent a message to someone but got no reply for a long time

I'd like to talk about a message I sent last year to my friend Diệp, who I've known since we were six and who moved to Germany in 2023 to train as a nurse. We'd been drifting apart. The time difference didn't help, and our chats had shrunk to birthday stickers. Then in October my grandmother, who Diệp used to call 'Grandma' too, went into hospital in Quảng Ngãi. I wrote Diệp a long message, probably three hundred words, telling her what had happened and admitting that I missed her and felt bad about how distant we'd become. Nothing came back. Not the next day, not that week. The message showed as delivered but not seen, and I checked it far more often than I'd like to admit. In total I waited twenty-three days. During that time I went through every stage. First I assumed she was busy. By the second week I'd decided I had said too much and embarrassed her. By the third I was drafting a cold little follow-up in my head, something like, 'No worries if you're too busy to reply,' which of course means the opposite. I'm glad I never sent it. When she finally answered, it was a four-minute voice message. Her phone had been stolen on a train, she'd lost access to the account, and she had only just got it back. She was crying halfway through. So what I felt in the end was relief, and some shame at the story I'd invented. It taught me that silence is usually about the other person's circumstances rather than about you. We now call on the first Sunday of every month, and my grandmother, who recovered, sometimes joins in.