I Do Not Exist

I have long since stopped keeping track of dates, if only because the world has forgotten me, but I know for a fact that I disappeared July 13, 2012.

No one noticed when I went missing. I didn’t notice either at first. It was the weekend, so I spent the most part of the day inside the apartment. There were the signs of course; when I went on my morning jog the neighbor’s dog didn’t bark at me, the cyclists damn near ran me over, and just about everyone stepped on my feet.

I only realized something was wrong when I went out for lunch at the bagel place at the street corner. It had emptied out thanks to the competition of a Panera a block away, meaning I was one of the few customers there. A underpaid worker drummed his fingers against the counter. I waited for him to notice me, but it looked like he was spaced out in his own head. Even when I was standing right in front of him he didn’t look up.

I cleared my throat. He looked straight ahead.

“Excuse me.” I raised my voice. Suddenly he blinked and straightened up. He seemed confused, as if he had been shaken from a dream.

After he took my order he threw the bagel in the toaster and leaned back to wait. Another employee shouted at him from the back. I assumed he would be back in no time, but long after the order had popped up, he was nowhere to be seen. It was only the smell of burning that brought him back.

He looked surprised and looked around. I pressed my lips into a smile and came forward. All he did was turn his back to me.

“Anyone want this? It looks like she left.”

“I’m right here!”

He spun around.

“Sorry to keep you waiting ma'am, can I take your order?”

“That is my order.”

He knitted his brow together in doubt. I showed him the receipt, and he reluctantly handed the bagel over.

No one payed any attention to me the at the office the next day. It wasn’t particularly unusual, they were my coworkers, not my friends. It was pointless to form attachments to the other rats in the race. Someone would always try to drag me into a conversation about sports or ask what I did over the weekend. I would mutter a half assed response and shrug. Polite chit chat was strangely isolating. It was like they were trying to reach out to me, but in a way that showed that they didn’t actually care about anything beneath surface level.

There was something off that day. I wasn’t wrangled into talking about the game when I came to the water cooler, but they didn’t step aside either. They barely seemed to register when I stepped between them.

“Excuse me.”

“Did you hear something?” I didn’t know his name, but I always called him Kyle in my head. Some people just have a face for a certain name. I never bothered to remember any of my coworkers names on less it was a need to know fact.

“Hilarious.” I grumbled.

My cubicle was the same as any other, a cluttered and confined space with a single plant. Every attempt at personalization was futile in the middle of fluorescent lights and the threat of someone looking over your shoulder.

When I went in all my things were gone. It wasn’t anything much, just the cactus and the barn owl calendar, but those were my things. Why would someone take them? Who was so bored that they would steal a near dead cactus?

The manager brought someone I had never seen in.

“This will be yours. No one’s used it in years.”

Oh God. They were firing me without notice. I was just an accountant, and I wasn’t the best, but I’d worked there for too many years to be let go like this.

“Can I talk to you about this privately?”

The manager didn’t respond. He looked annoyed, as if I were a mosquito buzzing around his ear.

“We did find some junk in here. Not sure who put that there.”

He left, and the new girl went to work. She put her things where mine had once been; a stress ball, a wedding photo, a live, laugh, love plaque. It made me sick.

“I’m not blaming you, but they didn’t tell me about this. You’ll have to move once I straighten things out.”

She didn’t look up.

Fine. Let her be that way.

It was as if I were being shunned. No one spoke to me all day. At first I thought I had made a serious mistake, I had missed an e-mail letting me go this morning. But to go so far as to mandate a shunning was too far.

I swung the manager’s door open. The desk minder didn’t look up.

“What the Hell is happening?”

She glanced at me and came my way.

“Sorry, it’s been a weird day. Do you know why everyone’s ignoring me?”

She passed me by and looked outside. Seeing no one she shrugged and went back to her seat. I waved my hand in front of her face. She didn’t even blink.

I ran down the stairs, out of the building, and into the street. The whole way I was ignored; people walked straight towards me, hitting me without missing a step. I stood in the middle of the street and screamed.

My apartment was completely empty. The walls were stripped bear, the bed was gone, it was scrubbed clean of everything that said I had been there. Everything I owned was gone, all except for the clothes on my back and the contents of my purse.

This wasn’t happening. It was a mental break, a psychotic episode from too much stress or something gone wrong in my brain. I didn’t have a pre-existing mental condition that had showed itself before, but now it was hitting me out of nowhere.

I ducked into an alley and called the emergency number.

“I’m having a mental break down and I don’t know what to do.”

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

He hung up a second later.

My mother was my last resort. I was always an only child, so I was both the golden child and the black sheep rolled into one. She always relished the chance to tear into me no matter what.

“Hi, this is Dot.”

“Mom it’s me and-”

“Huh? What? Speak up! Is this a prank call?”

No matter what I said, she steamrolled over me. In the few times we had spoken since leaving home she twisted my words and made me out to be a selfish, ungrateful brat. Now she appeared to ranting to herself about goddamned kids.

Eventually she hung up on me.

So that was it. There was a hole in the world where I should have been.

The first year was rough. I tried everything that I could think of to get any kind of attention. I would talk to strangers on the subway, follow my neighbors to the doors, call random phone numbers. Anything to be noticed.

I thought that I was dead for a good deal of that time. I wondered when it had happened. Had I died in my sleep? Maybe this was purgatory, a place between life and death. I had been dead for so long that everyone had moved on without me. Or maybe this was a Hell built especially for me, my fears made real. I didn’t exist, and no one cared.

But if I was dead, then why was there no trace of my existence whatsoever? All I had called my own had vanished into thin air. There were blank spaces where I had stood in photos. None of my accounts existed on any platform. Looking up my family brought nothing but claims that my parents never had children.

Eventually I accepted the fact that I was in fact alive. I was hungry, I needed to sleep, and I could feel pain. The idea never left my mind.

I spent most of my time in my empty apartment. I walked in circles endlessly like a tiger in a zoo, treading a visible path around the sides of my cage.

Someone new moved in, a trio of stoners fresh out of college with no clue what to do. At first I stayed on the margins of their group, eating scraps of food and sleeping on the couch. The smell of bong smoke was too much for me. One warm night I left in search of somewhere new to stay.

I didn’t exist to others anyway, so it didn’t matter where I stayed. Even if I stole a piece of pizza right in front of them, they didn’t react. Whatever I took disappeared as well. I could throw chairs or slam doors, and they wouldn’t notice. Whatever I did was edited out of their perception of reality.

I could do whatever I wanted, and no one would care. Some days I wore clothes from high end boutiques and ate gourmet. Other days I wore nothing at all, dug through trashcans, and ran on all fours.

More often than not was the sheer boredom of it all. I had no obligations, no job, not a single person to give me something to live for. I bobbed along in the world with as much impact as fog.

Other people became off putting to me. They were like puppets my of skin, bone, and muscle. Each was set in their ways, so predictable in their paths. I was free from mankind and their insipid ways. And yet I am a parasite, like a mouse in the walls. I eat their food, I sleep in their beds, I wear their clothes. Everything I have I took from others.

I settled into a nice house a couple years ago. The attic is my headquarters, and while a family already lives here, it is my house, my home, my kingdom. They dwell under my roof because I allow it.

But there’s a problem. Today is January 13, 2022. Yesterday the little girl saw me.

I should have seen it coming. Something has been wrong for awhile now. The first sign it was when I took the last slice of pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. The mother, who had set it aside for herself, came out of the kitchen furious, and demanded to know who had taken it. I thought that she was picking a fight for no reason as mine had always done.

I was used to sitting down at the table and eating alongside them. I would listen to their conversations and complaints about the world outside my bubble. It was my favorite tv show. I connected with these people, knew their every move, caught up with the latest plot. They were closer to me than anyone, and they didn’t even know.

That’s how I had an up close view of things unraveling. They talked about hearing bumps in the night, finding crumb trails and things going missing. The signs of my existence, or lack thereof, were never noticed before. At first they thought I was a rat infestation. Then they saw my shadow on the wall, or saw my indention in their beds, they thought I was a ghost.

To exist again would put an end to the life I had built for myself in my own bubble of nonexistence.

I did something terrible today. The girl, she was too curious. She tried to catch herself a ghost you see. And she did. I stored most of my collection in the attic, which was accessed through a ladder in the ceiling of the second floor. While I was up there, the girl came up behind me.

“Hello?”

I turned around to the blinding white light of a cellphone flashlight. I did the only thing I could think of.

She fell so easily, like a sack of sawdust. From the crack I knew that something inside of her had moved in a way the body was never supposed to. Her spine bent backwards, and her limbs were all turned in different directions. She looked like the broken toy I saw her as.

They found the body soon after. I have locked the attic door and as I watch out the window. It’s too far down to jump. I hear the sound of sirens right now, meaning that the ambulance will be here soon. Someone will notice that the attic has been locked from the inside, and they’ll put the pieces together. A woman that wasn’t supposed to exist has lived inside their house for far longer than they will want to think about.

I used to want to be seen by someone, anyone. Now that I exist again, I must be a human being. My hair is matted, my face gaunt and hollow, and my breath rank. I have not spoken or been spoken to in years. I have gone from a one eyed queen in the valley of the blind, to a madwoman and a murderer.