CHICAGO, IL — At 10:16PM Sunday night the text message ‘Sorry, didn’t have service’ ended an eight-hour period of grueling radio silence between area couple Tony Ruczik and Chelsea Holden.

Following a pleasant, mutual back-and-forth of text messages, Tony Ruczik, a chef at a popular restaurant, was left in a proverbial limbo when the ellipses indicating that a new text was being written by Holden appeared on his screen for an excruciating eight hours.

“I kept waiting for a new text to arrive,” said the distraught kitchen worker, “but it never did. Those damn dots just sat there, torturing me all day.”

The exchange began around 10AM on Sunday and continued uninterrupted until the abrupt conclusion at 2:04PM, confounding a pattern of near-constant textual communication the couple has followed on a daily basis since their relationship bloomed in August.

Ruczik initially wrote off the uncharacteristically long lapse in correspondence as an indication that Holden had become unexpectedly busy, but the persistence of the ellipses eventually wore away at Ruczik’s deteriorating emotional faculties.

“The dots mean that she’s currently typing something. Did she start typing and stop? Did she accidentally type one letter and it’s now sitting there as if she’s typing out an actual message? Did she lose her phone while in the middle of typing something? Nothing makes sense anymore,” said the dumbfounded Chicago native.

“She must be dead,” concluded Ruczik.

Holden’s explanatory text brought much-needed relief to Ruczik, whose eight hours and twelve minutes of agony amounted to what he described as, “the worst day of [his] life.”