How do I explain why I disappeared?

Stop drafting the account. Close it, do not delete it, and write the short version instead. The short version is three sentences and you can write it now.

Send it or do not send it tonight. Both are allowed. What is not useful is a fifth draft, because the fifth draft is the same sequence that produced the silence, running on the apology instead of the reply.

Because there is not one. That is the honest finding and it is the reason four drafts have failed. From inside, nothing happened. There was no decision, no incident, no moment you could point to and say this is where I went.

There was a reply left until tomorrow. Then a week. Then a month, at which point answering had acquired a cost that not answering never had. Every step looked reasonable from where you were standing, which is exactly why none of them makes a sentence.

You are trying to narrate something that had no plot. That is why it keeps coming out false.

Worth being straight about, because it changes what you write. A long account is usually doing two jobs at once: telling them what happened, and getting yourself out from under how it looks.

The second job is the one that makes it long, and it is also the one that makes it read as a defence. Wanting to be understood is not a flaw and it is not something to be ashamed of. It is simply not what the message is for.

So the test on any sentence you are about to send is narrow: is this for them, or is this for me. Keep the first. Put the second in the file you closed and did not delete.

Do not hand them the mechanism. Naming a pattern in an apology reads as an explanation of why it was not your fault, whatever you meant by it, and it asks the other person to hold a framework in order to accept a sorry.

Do not make a promise about the next time. You do not have the evidence yet, they have heard the sentence before, and a promise moves the conversation from what happened to what is owed.

Do not ask for a response in the message. A question puts a task on somebody who did not ask for one, and it turns your apology into something they now have to manage.

What they do with it. That is theirs entirely, and this page is not going to speculate about it, because a page that speculates would be doing the thing it just told you not to do.

You may also not get to know. Silence is a possible outcome and it is not information about whether the message was the right one. The message was the repetition. The repetition is the part that was yours.

That is a harder frame than the one you came here for and it is the only one that holds. Sending three true sentences is complete in itself, whatever happens next, and it does not become retrospectively wrong.

An entry. Filed late, which is an ordinary thing a record accepts rather than a failure being reopened.

There is no shame register here and nowhere for a guilt entry to be filed. The next name that appears on your screen and produces the same tightness is the one that is actually available to you, and it will arrive sooner than another draft would.