Documentation
886 Words
And then I looked up at the street around me and realized I had no idea where I was.
I didn't recognize any of the buildings. I didn't remember walking here. I had no memory of how I'd gotten to this exact corner. I'd been walking for hours but I had no sense of direction. No sense of where I'd come from.
For a moment, I couldn't remember my own address.
I found my address the way you find anything when you're lost. By stopping and looking at my phone. The GPS took me home. I walked through streets that should have been familiar but weren't. Every landmark looked like a copy of itself. Every intersection could have been any other intersection. The city had become a maze designed specifically for people who weren't quite real.
I got home around ten o'clock. I locked the door. I pulled all the curtains. I sat on my couch and I didn't turn on any lights. Just sat there in the dark, listening to my own breathing, making sure it was still happening. Making sure I was still here.
That was Tuesday night.
By Wednesday morning, I'd made a decision. If I was disappearing, if I was being erased, then I was going to leave a trail. A record so complete, so comprehensive, so detailed that even if everyone else forgot me, the documentation would prove I'd existed. I would become my own evidence. I would be self-sufficient. I would not need the world to remember me because I would remember myself.
I called in sick to work. I didn't go to Rosario's. I didn't go anywhere. I stayed home and I started writing.
I opened a new document on my computer. I titled it "The Evidence of Eli Marsh." And then I started from the beginning.
I wrote about my birth. November 14th, 1991. My parents' names. The hospital where I was born. The weight and length I was when I came out. I didn't have most of this information. I called my mother and asked her for the details. She gave them to me in the tone of someone humoring a person she was becoming increasingly concerned about. I wrote it all down anyway.
I wrote about my childhood. Elementary school. Lincoln Elementary. Teacher's names. Mrs. Patterson in third grade. Mr. Chen in fourth. I could barely remember their faces but I wrote down what I could. I wrote about the field trips. The cafeteria where I sat alone because I didn't know how to approach other children. The boy named Trevor who was mean to me and the way it made me feel less real, like his cruelty was the only thing that confirmed I existed.
I wrote about middle school. The years when I became invisible by choice. When I figured out that being quiet and unobtrusive was a survival strategy. When I learned that not being noticed was easier than being noticed and rejected. That's when the foundation was laid. That's when I started disappearing.
I spent the entire day writing. By evening, I had forty pages. My childhood. My adolescence. Every memory I could access. Every person who had ever acknowledged my existence. I printed it all out. I held the stack of pages and I felt the weight of my own life in my hands. Physical proof. Tangible evidence.
But it wasn't enough.
I needed photographs. I needed visual confirmation. I went through my apartment and I found my old photo albums. The ones I hadn't looked at in years. I opened them and I was shocked at how few photographs I was in.
There were pictures of places. My parents' house. Vacations to the beach. Family events. But in most of them, I was absent. Or I was in the background. Or I was the one holding the camera. I counted the photos where I was the clear subject. The focus. The point of the image.
Seventeen. In thirty years, I had seventeen photographs where I was the main subject.
I went through them one by one and I wrote descriptions. "Age seven, at Disneyland. I'm wearing a Mickey Mouse hat. I look confused like I don't understand why I'm there. My father took this photo but he's cropped mostly out of frame." "Age fourteen, at my mother's company picnic. I'm sitting at a table with other teenagers who are not my friends. They're ignoring me. I'm looking at the camera like I want to disappear."
For each photograph, I wrote the memory attached to it. Not just the facts but the feeling. The texture of the moment. The sense I'd had of being present but not quite existing. Because that was the pattern. That was the thread running through my entire life.
I was always there but never really there.
Wednesday night, I organized all of it. The written memories. The photographs. I scanned the photographs into the computer. I created a file labeled "Physical Evidence." I printed everything out again. Hundreds of pages now. My entire life documented and preserved.
It still felt insufficient.
Thursday morning, I called Mara.
"I need to see you," I said.
"Okay. When?"
"Now. Today. Before you forget."
There was a pause. "Forget what?"
"Me. Before you forget me."
"Eli, you're scaring me again."
- Writer
