Anxious attachment is not neediness — it's a survival strategy your nervous system learned when love felt unpredictable. You can heal it as an adult by working with the original subconscious imprint, not by trying to talk yourself out of the alarm. You check your phone again. It has been forty-seven minutes since you sent the message and you can feel the cortisol moving through you like a slow current. You re-read what you wrote. You look at the punctuation. You wonder if the full stop was too cold. You consider the possibility that they have decided, in this forty-seven-minute window, that they no longer love you, that they never really did, that something has shifted, that this is the end. You know, rationally, that this is absurd. They are at work. They are driving. They are in a meeting. You can hear your rational mind narrating all