Mara
804 Words
I thought about calling the office. Asking about coming back. But I already knew what Patricia would say. She'd tell me to take more time. She'd tell me that the job could wait. She'd tell me that my health was the important thing. She'd tell me all the things people say when they want someone to go away and never come back.
So I didn't call.
Instead, I did something I hadn't done in years. I went through old photo albums. Real physical albums. Not digital scans. The actual books. I opened them and I looked at all the photographs where I was absent. Where I was the photographer, not the subject. Where I was the presence making other people visible.
There were dozens of them.
Me holding the camera at my parents' anniversary party. Me behind the lens at Mara's college graduation. Me taking pictures of friends at a birthday party where I was invited but not really included. I'd become invisible in my own life by insisting on capturing everyone else's visibility.
There was one photograph from college. Mara had taken it. I wasn't expecting it. I was standing in the library, looking at a book. Not posing. Just existing. For once, I hadn't known the camera was there. And I could see in my face something different. Something less careful. Something that looked almost real.
I stared at that photograph for a long time.
Was that really me? Or was that someone I'd imagined being? Someone I'd created in my head to explain why I was so quiet. Why I took so little space. Why I made myself so small.
I placed the photograph on my desk. And I stared at it while I opened a new notebook. Volume 7. I wrote the date: Tuesday, 2:34 PM. And then I started writing about what I saw in that photograph.
"This is me at nineteen. I look like I'm about to disappear. My face has that quality of someone who is barely present. Someone who is existing but not living. Someone who is already practicing being invisible.
"I wonder when I started doing this. When did I decide that being unseen was easier than being seen? Was it always in me? Was there a moment where I chose it? Or is this just who I am?
"Maybe there is no Eli Marsh trying to survive in a world that's forgetting him. Maybe there is just the idea of Eli Marsh. The concept. The ghost. The absence taking up space."
I kept writing. For hours. I wrote about every photograph. Every memory. Every moment where I'd chosen to be peripheral rather than central. I wrote about the accumulation of small disappearances that had added up to a life that wasn't quite real.
By evening, I had filled an entire notebook. By morning, I'd filled another.
The handwriting was getting worse. It was shaking. It was slanting at odd angles. It was becoming less and less legible. Like the person writing was slowly losing the ability to communicate. Like the voice itself was disappearing.
On Thursday, I decided to leave the apartment.
I wasn't sure why. It wasn't a rational decision. It was more like my body had made a choice and my mind was just along for the ride. I got dressed. I put on the blue shirt again. And I went out into the city.
I walked without direction. I passed people who didn't see me. I passed buildings that had never known I existed. I passed Rosario's and I kept walking. I didn't need coffee. I didn't need to test whether anyone remembered me. I already knew. The answer had always been no.
I found myself at the park where Mara and I used to go when we were in college. It was the place where we'd sit and talk for hours. The place where I'd felt, for brief stretches of time, like I was actually connected to another person. Like I mattered.
The park looked exactly the same. The bench was still there. The same trees. The same path around the perimeter. It was like the world was frozen in time, except I'd changed. Or rather, I'd disappeared. The world had stayed the same and I'd slowly erased myself from it.
I sat on the bench for an hour. Then two. People passed by. They didn't notice me. I was just another person sitting in the park. Invisible. Peripheral. A background element in other people's stories.
Around five o'clock, I saw someone walking toward me. It took me a moment to recognize them. It was a woman. Dark hair. She was looking at her phone. She was walking directly toward me and I was about to move, to get out of her way, when she looked up.
It was Mara.
- Writer
