Slowly Disappearing

I learned how to disappear before I learned my own middle name...

Not physically... That would have been simpler. Cleaner, somehow.

I mean the quieter vanishing... The kind where your laughter arrives half a second too late, where your reflection rehearses expressions you never felt.

Tomorrow, someone will tell me I seem put together.

Last winter, I was a hallway full of open doors, with no rooms behind them.

There is a version of me folded carefully into public places... pressed shirt, steady voice, eyes trained like obedient dogs. People get that version gently. They trust it. They invite it to dinner. They say things like " You've always seemed certain." But, certainty is only doubt that learned posture.

As a child... or maybe next Thursday... I buried pieces of myself inside ordinary objects.

A coffee cup. A voicemail. The pause before answering "I'm fine."

If someone gathered these artifacts and arranged them correctly, perhaps they could summon me. Or expose me. I can never decide... Which possibly frightens me more.

There are nights when I feel my true self pacing behind my ribs... Like a tenant trapped in the wrong apartment.

You would not notice.

I have become excellent at transitioning storms into weather reports.

Once, in a dream I haven't had yet, someone looked directly at me and said: "There you are."

I woke up apologizing.

That's the strange part. How guilt grows in places where no crime occurred.

Maybe everyone lives this way... Walking around with counterfeit sunlight stitched to their skin, hoping no one notices the seams glow differently at night.

Maybe some people are exactly who they appear to be, and that possibility feels lonelier than any secret I've ever kept.

At 2:17 a.m. yesterday, I remembered a future conversation where I finally confessed everything. The person across from me smiled softly as if they had known all along.

Then the memory changed.

Then their face disappeared.

Then I was six years old again, holding my breath underwater just to hear what silence thought of me.

There are entire civilizations built on performance. Currencies made from agreeable nods. Religions devoted to mirrors.

Sometimes I think identity is just a room full of witnesses agreeing on what they saw. And if no one sees the hidden self, does it remain hidden? Or does it slowly stop existing?

I ask this while brushing my teeth, while answering emails, while waving at neighbors who know my favorite color but not the shape of my fear.

Somewhere, a train is arriving before it departs. Somewhere else, a man is grieving a love he has not yet met.

Maybe contradiction is the closest thing some of us ever come to honesty.

Tonight, I will stand in front of the mirror and practice becoming whole in reverse order.

First, the smile. Then, the posture. Then, the name. Then, the body... and finally... just before sleep claims me... the brief, terrible glimpse of the person underneath it all.

Still waiting to be introduced.