Disappearance

Fiction

Jump into the stars and see some antidote to reality.

⬩

You are frightened. An empty mirror gazes back at you in the first moments of dawn. You have this realization that something has taken over. Taken over it all — your movements are not your own or they are disassociated from your mind.

You have become invisible. Something your childhood self wished as a superpower in cape or wand form for the benefit of secrecy and spying. But superpowers can be turned on and off; it was really because you had nowhere to go that was your own private space. Now, that would be enough. When they were here, you each had your little caves in the house. Unspoken rules dictated how close or when one of the others could enter. And now —

You can still feel your full weight; sublimation is impossible. There, on the bed, is the outline of where you slept. Your bare feet feel the cold floor below.

To be doubly sure, you hop quickly into the shower even before the water becomes warm. Your body tenses in response to the temperature it was exposed to then slowly melts as the warmth comes through. You blindly examine your elbows and shoulders and clavicles as you wash them. All the strange undulations suddenly became extremely important as if you are making a sculpture of your body out of water hollowed out.

You can’t remember why you are alone in the house until you are completely dried off. They went away for a few days, to give me space. The memory returns to you. It seemed to happen so suddenly, perplexingly.

⬩

Merge the self with the wool that covers our bodies over time, weaved by those who care for us.

Photo by Walter Walraven on Unsplash

Through empty space you find your face with your hands. Cupping your soft cheeks, still moist, you then move into the normal routine of your morning.

Out of habit, makeup disguises the obscured undulations accumulating years. Creams and certain colors placed here and there create a distraction from the lines leading nowhere. They place a corset on your soul. You thought things would be different.

A shadowy double echoes your movements. You reach toward the glass, searching for this substance that follows you, shrouds you. The cloak of death or some manifestation of nostalgia? You dive into your life’s work with this always behind you.

Love tries to find its way into your heart.

⬩

Life’s brutal measures are just that. They are chilling reminders of our lives’ lost to society’s strange markers of time and success.

On the same day you realize that what has been bothering you for the last few years, increasing in severity as a foggy mass that looms behind you in any reflective element, is a new state of invisibility, you ironically decided that what you actually desire is to disappear. You must have caused this transformation from within.

You clench your teeth harder once you know what it is, but only notice about the teeth when you ask your mouth to breathe deeply.

You don’t want to die. You’re perfectly aware that going away is a kind of euphemism for death. But in your case, you feel that disappearance could achieve a kind of consciousness you have sought after…so long…

⬩

You wake in the middle of the night to drastic rain and thunder and lightening for this temperate place, this in-between climate that rarely threatens heat or cold or storms or snow.

You miss the extremes. The exhausting constancy of sort-of-cool and sort-of-wet are too numbing for your persona. You live in poetry. You release yourself to the plays of language, whipping from one line to the next. You are that ghostly snake moving at unearthly speed among the pages on the shelves, yielding a tongue that strikes the keys to type your consciousness into being.

In the blackness of two o’clock, you look out the window and whisper to yourself:

I crave a lion’s heart. I crave a monster.

You can feel your jaw clenching subconsciously, carrying around the tension of the day to come.

⬩

The thing follows. You bleed into the day and hope for its swift ending. Again and again. You’re not afraid of not mattering but of not enjoying life — of being burnt in incessant mundanity so that the other stuff doesn’t happen or happens only superficially.

You are terrified of this. Two years already spent wishing away the days. Since they left. Good-bye. It is a vivid memory and a euphemism all at once. They are gone from this world. Why can’t you conjure other memories so sharply? Why can’t they live joyously in your mind? Instead, they wave and run off, again and again. And again. The incessant replayed departure has depleted your body of all color. Grief forms constant incertitude. You approach it with interest and curiosity but still have that fear somewhere in your spine. It crawls out at unpredictable moments like a snake that lives alongside your vertebrae, an evil parasite born from your mistakes. Striking similarities of your skeletal movements as you twist and writhe through unclarity make doppelgängers of spine and snake.

If you could just be —

⬩

Write out the stories in your mind.

Arrive at the distance of oblivion.

Seek solace in love.

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I wasn’t sure if this was a full fledged story or a word sketch, so I’ll leave that up to you. What was your superpower as a kid and how has that thought shifted over time?

Here is a wonderfully moving song that somehow connects with this fiction for me:

And some related literature:

⬩“On Disappearing,” a poem by Major Jackson
⬩Wikipedia page on Invisibility in Fiction, but shockingly leaves out Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Thank you for reading!