Before the World Forgot Me

Silence

"I don't know what to do. I don't know how to stop myself from being invisible when I've spent thirty-two years perfecting the skill. I don't know how to ask for help. I don't know how to demand to be seen. I don't know how to exist without disappearing.

"Maybe I never existed at all. Maybe the Eli Marsh that's in these notebooks is just a character. Someone invented. Someone imagined. A ghost made of ballpoint pen and regret.

"Tomorrow is Monday. I need to go back to work. I need to pretend that what happened on Monday before this is not happening. I need to exist in the world in a way that makes people remember me. But I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to be real."

I closed the notebook.

I looked at the stack of them. All of them full of my voice. Full of my memories. Full of my attempts to prove that I existed. And I realized that they were evidence of the opposite. They were evidence of someone trying desperately to construct an existence that wasn't naturally occurring. Someone trying to write themselves into being.

Monday morning came. I didn't call in sick this time. I put on the blue shirt again. I went to the office. I sat at my desk. I tried to be normal.

But something had shifted in me. I'd read my own history and I'd seen the pattern so clearly that I couldn't unsee it. I was invisible because I'd learned to be invisible. The world was forgetting me because I'd taught the world to forget me.

The question now was whether I could un-teach them.

Around eleven o'clock, my manager Patricia called me into her office. I assumed it was about medical leave. About the employee assistance program. About how I needed to take time to deal with whatever was happening in my head.

Instead, she said: "We've decided to put you on administrative leave for a while. With pay. We think it would be good for you to take some time."

"Am I being fired?" I asked.

"No," she said. "But we think you need to focus on yourself. On whatever's happening with you."

What was happening with me was that I was disappearing. But I couldn't tell her that. I couldn't explain that I'd been disappearing for my entire life and I'd only just noticed.

"When do I leave?" I asked.

"Today, if possible. We can arrange for you to pick up your things. But we'd like you to take some time away from the office."

They wanted me gone. They wanted me to stop being present and reminding them that I existed. They wanted me to disappear into my apartment and my notebooks and my pathology and stop being visible in their space.

I agreed. I packed a box with the few things that were actually mine. A mug. A picture frame with no picture in it. Some pens. I carried it out to my car. Nobody said goodbye. Nobody acknowledged that I was leaving.

I drove home in silence.

And the worst part was that it felt like a relief. Like the world was finally letting me do what I'd always wanted to do. It was finally giving me permission to completely disappear. To stop trying. To stop documenting. To just accept the invisibility that had always been my natural state.

That evening, I opened notebook Volume 6. I wrote: "They put me on leave. I'm invisible enough now that they don't want me around even when I'm trying to be visible. So this is it. This is the moment where I stop fighting. This is where I let myself disappear completely."

I closed the notebook.

And I realized something that made my skin go cold.

I didn't recognize my own handwriting anymore.

The writing on this last page looked different from the pages before it. It looked like someone else had written it. Or like I'd written it in a state where I was not quite myself. It looked the way a ghost might write. The way someone might write who was already halfway gone.

I put down the pen. I put away the notebook. I went to bed.

And that night, I dreamed that I was dissolving. Starting from the edges. My hands becoming transparent. My feet becoming smoke. My voice becoming something less than sound. I was disappearing in real time and all I could do was watch it happen.

I woke up and I couldn't feel my hands.

For almost a full minute, I couldn't feel them. Couldn't feel my fingers. Couldn't feel my arms. Couldn't feel anything below my wrists. And I lay there in the dark, panicking, trying to convince my body that it still existed. Trying to tell myself that this was impossible. That people don't just stop existing.