Before the World Forgot Me

The Documentation II

"Do you think about me? When I'm not on the phone, I mean. Do I cross your mind?"

There was a long pause. The kind of pause that contains truth.

"Of course," she said. But her tone suggested this might not be entirely accurate. "You're my son."

"But do you actually think about me? Or am I just someone you're obligated to think about?"

"I think about both of my children," she said. "It's just... it's been a while since we've seen each other. And you don't call very often. So it's easy to not think about you for stretches of time."

It was honest, at least. It was the truth. The world simply didn't think about me when I wasn't actively presenting myself. I existed only in the moments when I was visible. Otherwise, I was gone.

"I should come visit," I said.

"That would be nice," she said. And then, like an afterthought: "Are you doing okay? You sound strange."

"I'm fine. Just documenting things."

"Documenting?"

"Never mind. I'll call you soon."

I hung up and I added the entire conversation to the notebook. Every word. Every pause. Every confirmation that I was not actually part of my mother's internal life.

By Sunday, I had five notebooks filled. Five complete volumes of my own existence. Thousands of pages. I organized them in chronological order. I color-coded them. I created an index. I was building a library of myself. A self-contained proof of personhood that didn't require anyone else's participation.

It should have made me feel better. It didn't.

Instead, it made me feel worse. Because looking at all of it laid out in front of me, I could see the pattern clearly. The throughline of my entire existence was absence. I was built from absences. Every memory was really a memory of not being noticed. Every relationship was really a relationship of being peripheral. I had documented a life that was fundamentally made of invisibility.

And the more I documented it, the more visible that invisibility became.

Sunday evening, I stood in my apartment surrounded by notebooks. Five volumes on the desk. Twelve more waiting to be filled. I picked up one at random and I opened it. I read a page. A memory from when I was sixteen. A school dance that I attended but didn't really attend. I went to it in body but not in spirit. Nobody talked to me. Nobody asked me to dance. I stood against the wall and watched other people exist and I felt like I was watching a world that I wasn't part of.

And the kicker was that I'd chosen to go. I'd chosen to put myself in that situation where I would inevitably feel invisible. I'd done that to myself.

How many times had I done that? How many times had I put myself in situations where I would definitely be forgotten? How many times had I sought out invisibility?

I thought about the barista problem. I thought about how Marcus had quit the coffee shop and somehow in my mind, that had become evidence of me being forgotten. But what if I'd just never actually talked to Marcus? What if I'd existed at the coffee shop in the same way I existed everywhere else. Present in body. Absent in every other way.

What if my entire disappearance was something I'd been constructing gradually for thirty-two years?

What if forgetting wasn't something that was happening to me, but something I was doing to myself?

I sat down at my desk. I picked up a pen. I turned to a blank page in Volume 5. And I wrote: "Sunday, 11:34 PM. I think I've been wrong about everything. I don't think the world is forgetting me. I think I've been forgetting myself. I've been constructing my own invisibility piece by piece. Every time I chose not to speak up. Every time I held back. Every time I decided it was safer to be peripheral than to be seen. I've been writing myself out of existence long before anyone else started forgetting me.

"The documentation can't help because the documentation is just recording the disappearance. It's not preventing it. It's documenting the process of my own erasure. And the more I document it, the more real the erasure becomes.