My Disappearance

Disappearance doesn’t happen all at once.

It’s not a vanishing.

It’s a thinning.

A slow erosion of presence, a quiet fading at the edges of myself. The underwater mind pulls me down, the weight holds me there, and somewhere in the pressure and the dimness, I begin to lose definition.

I don’t stop existing.

I stop appearing.

The first part of me to disappear is my voice.

Not the sound — the certainty.

Words feel heavy in my mouth, thick with effort. Sentences form slowly, dragging themselves through water. I speak less, not because I have nothing to say, but because saying anything feels like lifting something too heavy.

Then my expressions fade.

My face becomes a mask of effort — not blank, just muted.

The muscles that once animated my emotions now move sluggishly, as if they’re conserving energy. Smiles feel foreign. Frowns feel distant. Even surprise feels delayed.

I watch myself from the inside and think:

I used to be louder than this.

The next part to disappear is my initiative.

Tasks don’t get done.

Not because I forget — because I dissolve.

The part of me that reaches, starts, decides, moves… thins out until it’s barely there. I become someone who watches life happen from a few seconds behind.

My children feel this shift before I do.

They look at me longer.

They ask fewer questions.

They move around me gently, as if I’m made of something fragile.

They don’t see danger.

They see absence.

The hardest disappearance is internal — the fading of the self I recognize.

The one who jokes.

The one who creates.

The one who thinks in sharp lines and bright images.

The one who knows what she wants.

She doesn’t leave.

She just becomes quiet.

A silhouette behind frosted glass.

I move through rooms like a shadow of myself — present enough to function, absent enough to feel unreal. The world continues around me, but I feel like I’m watching it through a thick pane of water. Everything is slowed, distorted, softened to the point of unreality.

This is not numbness.

Numbness is clean.

This is dilution.

A thinning of identity.

A softening of edges.

A quiet retreat from the surface of my own life.

I don’t disappear from the world.

I disappear from myself.

And the most disorienting part is this:

no one else can see the exact moment it happens.

Not even me.

One day I’m here — bright, sharp, present.

The next, I’m a faint outline moving through the same spaces, performing the same tasks, but without the internal anchor that makes those movements feel like mine.

This is the disappearance of the ground.

Not dramatic.

Not catastrophic.

Just quiet.

Just heavy.

Just real.

A slow fading of the self under the weight of the weather.