Before the World Forgot Me

Gradual

Gradually, the sensation came back. Pins and needles. That sick feeling of limbs falling asleep and waking up again. I moved my fingers. I felt them. I was still here.

But for that minute, I'd experienced what was coming.

I'd experienced what it felt like to not exist.

---

# Before the World Forgot Me

## CHAPTER 5: The Forgetting Accelerates

Two weeks of administrative leave is a strange thing to experience. It's not vacation because you know you're not wanted. It's not time off because you know you have to go back. It's a suspension. A holding pattern. A place where you exist but are required to do nothing with that existence.

I stopped leaving my apartment after the first week.

There was no point. I had nowhere to be. No one was waiting for me. No one was noticing my absence because they'd already decided I was absent even when I was present. So I stayed home. I sat at my desk surrounded by notebooks. I didn't fill them. I just looked at them. Like they were evidence of a crime I'd committed against myself.

I tried calling Mara on Thursday of week one. She didn't answer. I called again on Friday. No answer. Saturday morning, she texted me back: "Hi. Sorry I've been busy. Work stuff. Can I call you later?"

I waited for the call. It didn't come. Sunday I texted her again: "Hey. Just checking in."

Her response came Monday morning: "Yeah, all good. Just swamped. Talk soon."

But "talk soon" was the kind of thing people said when they were trying to create distance without being honest about it. I knew because I'd said it a thousand times. It was a verbal ghost. A promise that nobody intended to keep.

I tried calling her on Tuesday of week two. This time she answered, but her voice was different. Not cold exactly. Just distant. Like she was calling from very far away.

"Hey," she said.

"Hi. I haven't heard from you in a while."

"Yeah, I know. Work has been insane."

"You said that before. Is everything okay?"

There was a pause. Not the pause of someone thinking. The pause of someone trying to figure out how honest to be with someone they don't know well.

"Eli," she said slowly, "are we close?"

The question landed like a physical blow. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I feel like I should know you better. But I'm not sure I do. We hang out but I don't feel like we're actually close. Does that make sense?"

"We've been friends for eight years," I said.

"I know. But it's like... I don't know. I feel like I'm friends with an idea of a person, not with an actual person. You know?"

I knew exactly what she meant. I was an abstraction to her. A recurring presence that had never actually solidified into something real. I was the friend she had because the alternative was having no friends, not because she genuinely wanted to spend time with me.

"I think I'm going to be really busy for a while," she continued. "With work and stuff. So I might not be able to hang out as much."

"How much less?" I asked.

"I don't know. We'll see."

We didn't see. After that phone call, I didn't hear from Mara again. I texted her twice more. Once on Wednesday. Once on Friday. Neither message received a response. I looked at her i********:. She was active. She was posting photos. She was living her life. But I was not part of that life anymore. I had been ejected from it.

Eight years of friendship. Compressed into a moment of distance. Collapsed into this phone call where she'd essentially told me that she didn't know me. That I wasn't real enough to maintain a relationship with.

The worst part was that she wasn't wrong.

By the end of the second week, I'd stopped trying to contact anyone. I stopped checking email. I stopped looking at my phone. I just sat at my desk and I looked at the notebooks. All those pages filled with documentation of a life that apparently wasn't real enough to matter.