The ejection
818 Words
I was being ejected from my apartment. The last physical space where I could claim to exist was being taken away. I had seven days to leave.
I sat on my couch and I tried to feel something about this. Fear. Panic. Desperation. Something. But I felt numb. Numb and far away. Like I was watching this happen to someone else. Like Eli Marsh was being evicted but Eli Marsh wasn't actually here to experience it.
That night, I didn't sleep. I spent it going through the notebooks. All seven volumes. All the documentation I'd created. All the proof that I'd existed. I read through them and I saw what I should have seen all along.
The notebooks weren't evidence of my existence. They were evidence of my non-existence. They were the desperate attempts of someone who knew, on some level, that they weren't real. Someone who was trying to convince themselves, and everyone else, that they mattered.
Around three in the morning, I started tearing them up.
Not all of them. Just the ones from the first week. The ones where the documentation was most frantic. The ones where I was most clearly trying to preserve something that was already gone. I tore out pages and I let them fall to the floor. I tore until my hands hurt. I tore until the notebook fell apart into confetti.
Then I stopped. I looked at the destroyed pages on my floor. At the remaining intact notebooks. At the evidence of myself that was literally and metaphorically falling apart.
I couldn't destroy all of it. Some part of me needed to keep something. Some part of me needed to maintain the belief that if I documented my existence thoroughly enough, it would become real. That if I wrote it all down, I would matter.
It was a delusional belief. I knew that now. But I couldn't quite let it go.
By Friday, I'd started packing.
I didn't know where I was going. I had no money. I'd missed three months of rent and I had maybe two thousand dollars in my savings account. I had no job. I had no place to live. I had nothing except seven notebooks and a blue shirt and a profound understanding that I was not real enough to exist in the world.
I put the notebooks in a backpack. I left the other clothing where it was. I left the furniture. I left everything except the proof that I'd tried to exist. And I waited for Sunday to arrive.
On Sunday evening, I locked my apartment one last time and I walked out into the city. I didn't know where I was going. I just knew that I couldn't stay. I couldn't wait for the official eviction. I couldn't face a sheriff telling me that I had nowhere to be.
So I left before they could tell me to leave.
I walked for hours. I passed homeless people on the street and I wondered if that was what I was now. Someone without a place. Someone without a claim to existence. Someone who was simply moving through the world taking up space that didn't belong to them.
I found myself at a train station. Grand Central. Or the equivalent. A cavernous space filled with people moving in coordinated directions. All of them knew where they were going. All of them had destinations. All of them existed as people with purposes.
I looked at the departures board. There were trains going everywhere. West. South. North. Away.
I bought a ticket with my credit card. I got on the first train that was boarding. I didn't know where it was going. I just knew I had to leave this city. I had to get away from the place where I'd failed to exist so spectacularly. Maybe somewhere else, I could try again. Maybe somewhere new, I could convince someone that I was real.
Or maybe I would just continue disappearing, one city at a time.
As the train pulled out of the station, I looked back at the city. The place where I'd spent eleven years trying to be visible. The place where I'd accumulated friendships and jobs and routines that were all designed to make me feel like I mattered. And it had all collapsed. It had all fallen apart because it had never been built on anything real.
I was the problem. I'd always been the problem. The world wasn't forgetting me. The world was simply recognizing the truth about me. That I was forgettable. That I was peripheral. That I was not the kind of person who was worth remembering.
The train picked up speed. The city disappeared behind us. And I sat in my seat with my backpack of notebooks and I wondered if anyone had even noticed that I'd left.
I doubted it.
I doubted anyone had noticed at all.
- Writer
