How You Master the Art of Disappearing

Step 1: if you manage to do this successfully, you’ll need to move on no further:

Headphones, a real banger tune, volume signals “you’re going to blow your ear drums out” notification.

You can’t hear anything outside of that beat. You get lost in what’s blaring through your head. You’ve created a world in which only you exist.

No one can reach you.

Success!

However, if not successful….

Step 2: you stepped back into reality just for a moment because something caught your eye. Or your ear.

Someone is waving you down.

You’ve been found, headphones off, and the man asks you for a light.

You’re polite. Sweet, always. And helpful. Of course.

He lights his cigarette. Gets to talking.

He’s smooth. Charismatic. You guess he’s kind of cute. But he is smooth.

We shoot the shit and laugh a few. When an idea is thrown: we should become one.

You don’t think this through- you are game for anything; you admire his boldness. You invite him upstairs. Spend a few hours doing what adults do. It IS all fun and games, you think. It felt.

He leaves that night, and you leave town for a few days.

Step 3: come back from your trip, and really learn how to disappear.

You go to bed Friday night, alone.

Saturday at 6am, you are awakened to tapping at your shoulder and you hear your name…

He scaled your second story apartment, broke through your patio door, came into your bedroom. You spend two days oscillating between freezing and fawning. Thinking if you’re just a good girl, you’ll get through this. If you’re nice, he’ll play nice. If you just do nothing, it will end.

You abandon yourself. This is one way to disappear.

Then, came a point where you couldn’t stand another minute of it. You had to get out. You had to go.

Step 4: you fight.

You get mean back. You yell. You get angry. You are unafraid now. It doesn’t matter anymore to you if you stay or disappear. You just know you can’t do nothing anymore.

You call him a name. A name men have directed at you thousands of times.

His face changes. He leaves to get something from the other room…

Your brain broke that day.

A weapon to your forehead.

You did not plead, you did not beg.

You stepped into it.

If he was going to make you disappear

What can you even do?

Becoming a terrifying woman scared him enough to leave.

You’re intact and whole.

You pick up the pieces and patch up your life over the next year.

But you’re different.

Step 5: when you heal, you disappear

You smile and laugh more than you have in a long time, surprisingly.

You make everything you do in life a ritual.

No one knows where you live anymore.

You don’t trust so easily.

You’ve dropped most your friends because they can’t fathom such heaviness.

The day you disappeared was horrific.

But the magician you are, you created a whole better life for yourself where you don’t want to disappear…

Now for your next act, you just might saw yourself in half…