You’re looking at your hand again. It’s progressed enough that you no longer have lines or fingerprints on your palms anymore. It’s such a strange thing because you vaguely remember someone once commenting on the sheer amount of lines you had. A palm reader looked long and hard at them and eventually just said you have an old soul. You flex and move and brush one finger pad over the other to feel that foreign smooth sensation again. You knew someone with no fingerprints before. A bad accident took them. His hands never felt this smooth though, always just a bit too rough to be comfortable. No, yours are smooth like board is smooth or freshly cleaned glass- no defect to be found to disrupt the planes because it’s all been wiped away.
You have the same movie as before on. You think that maybe you should take your limited time to finally watch that new show you wanted to see, but what if it has a cliffhanger? Or an idea that gets stuck in your head? You try to avoid media that gives you too many ideas. It hurts too much. It makes you think of all those hopes and dreams you gave up in pursuit of someone else’s. So you play the same movie over and over on loop. The glow of your computer screen is the only light in the room.
Your focus switches from your hand to your phone. You start flipping through the pictures in your gallery. It’s filled with mainly cute animals that you found off the internet, maybe a meme or two. There’s a lot of jokes in there about how terrible and pathetic you are. Those make you laugh the most. You try to keep what little pieces of joy you can. It’s not enough, evidently, but you try. You see a few of your colleagues and friends, group photos shared from big events. You even see a few of your family.
You stumble upon a picture of yourself. Your old self. The one that’s slowly wasting away like the rest of them. You can’t remember how long ago it was that you took this picture. It’s one of the few that you have of yourself. You’re not fond of pictures, just like you aren’t fond of mirrors, and no one really takes photos with you.
Even traces of the old you have eroded away.
You catch a glimpse of your face in the screen when the movie goes dark for a moment. Your skin is grey and snowy, and your face is almost featureless. You can’t remember where, but you think you used to have a few marks or spots on your face, maybe even a little scar. It doesn’t matter anymore. No one will remember soon enough.
You hear a ping. You thought it was the movie but know it well enough that this sound effect never pops up in it. Maybe it’s just more action in servers where people make plans that you won’t join. Conversations that you’ll watch. Maybe you could try connecting again.
But you stopped when you realized what was happening. There was no real point in fighting it. Fighting makes things take longer. It’s slower. More painful. You don’t know what would hurt more- the hope for change or crushing that hope- so it’s better to not hope at all. Hope is a painful thing.
The nice thing about unpersoning is that it’s gentle on others. No one realizes it. You fade away from their memories until, maybe one random day, they think of that odd person and maybe look them up to find out they died or something, but it’s been so long and things are so detached that all it can muster from them is an “oh, that’s too bad” before continuing on with their day. Really, you will be barely a memory. They won’t notice that your name doesn’t exist when they say it. It’ll be a little fuzzy sound at best, like a record skip. It’ll be painless for them.
How painless it is for you depends on how much you want to fight it.
You finally notice the little notification, a little red circle with a white ‘2’ in it, and frown. It’s probably some mass text, or one of those messages from all those groups that you tried joining. Another mixer, another movie, another game night, another something that always left you more drained than anything else. It’s why you stopped going.
You click it to get rid of the alert.
Except it’s a message for you.
The preview is a blur. The whole screen is a blur.
Hope is such a painful thing. It reinvigorates the want, stirs the beast, makes the yawning void in your chest feel wider and deeper than ever before. The tips of your fingers burn from it, like they’ve gotten too near a flame.
You don’t know when and why you’ve stopped being able to connect.
Actually, you do, but it’s easier to lie to yourself and say that you don’t. It makes you feel-- maybe not less stupid, but a different kind of stupid that you can live with. Ignorance feels easier than inadequacy on the ego.
But the result is all the same-- you’ve stopped connecting. Everyone is a potential for harm in your mind, and it all won’t matter because no one will stay. They say to accept that people come for a season, but every season heralded a new disaster. From the typhoon of a friend who repeatedly used you to cope with their trauma to a partner who burned you with their insecurities to a parent who drowned you in the depths of their expectations. It’s been nothing but typhoons and monsoons and fire. Every season leaves you a worse person until your world is an uninhabitable one of barren ground and ash. Every cloud terrifies you for the danger they represent. You don’t lie fallow so much as freeze for winter.
You want to know wind without storms.
You want to know warmth without fire.
You want to know rain without flooding.
It’ll hurt too much when they rage again.
It’ll hurt too much when you freeze again.
You close your laptop and roll away from it. The messages remain unread. You lay in silence and darkness on your bed that you’ve barely left for who knows how long. You can’t even keep up the pretense of being in any other part of your little home. Your box gets smaller. Your room feels colder. You pull the blanket around you and try to sleep until you have to get ready for work and ignore the itch in your fingers to look.
It’s 3:14AM on Sunday when you next enter consciousness. Least, that’s what your phone says. You’ve got 26 hours and 46 more minutes to sleep until you have to be up, but bodies don’t work like that unfortunately. Even ones disappearing into nothingness. You still have meds to take, even if they don’t need to be consumed for another 18 hours and 46 minutes before you need to do that. So you lay there instead and wonder if you can slip into darkness for a few more hours before your caffeine addiction declares that you need to at least consume your drug of choice.
Unfortunately, your mind is too wired on nothing for you to drift back to sleep. You tug the blanket closer around you and roll over. Eventually, you fish out your phone and start to do… something. You don’t want to look at social media. You don’t have any games to play. And you’ve already checked your email because that’s the first thing you do any time you wake up, even when you’re not supposed to be awake yet. You start swiping your screen between home and your apps pages while you think of something.
On accident, you tap your messaging app. You’ve long since turned off notifications for it, so the only way to know if there’s any messages for you on there is to actually open it. You’ve finally trained yourself to stop checking it as frequently as your email after weeks of unanswered messages and silence. If you stop hoping, you stop expecting, and eventually you stop hurting. Just as before, there’s nothing for you there beyond updates in group chats you’ve long since stopped reading.
Except there’s still those two messages for you.
You stare at them. You can’t even bring yourself to read the preview. They’re messages from… an acquaintance? Friend? Something in between? Would friends let friends go from being active to radio silent on them without checking? You used to try to check in on people- only the ones you knew in real life and occasionally talked to and only every now and then- but as isolation sunk in and your chest grew hollow, you haven’t had much energy to do so. And maybe you got tired of always being the one to reach out. To make things work. If you stopped, would the relationship atrophy or would the other side send a signal or two? You got your answer and insist you feel neutral about it. It’s what you expected.
Maybe you forgot something of theirs.
Maybe they need you to do something for them.
Maybe they want something from you.
You open the message, and immediately slam your phone to the mattress. Your chest tightens. Your breath hitches and holds. Look. Don’t look. Look. Don’t look. Would you be doing the same thing to them by not looking? Would that be fair? Your series of unread messages hurt you, and you wouldn’t want to do the same to someone else.
But your chest still tightens. It feels too close to hope, and you want to stop hurting.
You finally pick your phone up and read.
Hey, didn’t see your messages. I’m doing alright, just been busy with work and family and school. Things were just kinda hectic but seem to settle down now.
Wow, you’re so pathetic that you don’t know how to respond anymore.
Your phone tells you that it’s now 9:48AM, still Sunday, and still open to that message. It’s just a basic message. Niceties. Politeness. The one social norm that you are both really good at and fail horrendously- you’re good because you remember to do it and can work off it, you’re bad because you answer too honestly. Your knee jerk reaction is to want to answer truthfully.
Getting out of bed every day is getting harder and harder and you don’t know why you bother anymore because it all feels meaningless.
Your sadness has gotten so deep that all the work in the world can’t drown it out anymore and you don’t know how to cope.
You’re disconnected from people and don’t know how to change it because you know you need help but don’t want to burden people by asking for it and you’re scared that, even if you ask for help, none will come.
You’re about to disappear.
If you said my name, would it skip like a record?
You erase the message as soon as you write it. You try not to wince when you see the first letter of your username morph into a block as it begins to censor itself.
There it is. That’s why it’s better just to stay quiet. The little wince in your chest and that slight prick in your eyes tells you all the reasons why you leave things as they are and let the winter rot you away. You felt just a tinge of hope, and look what it got you.
He won’t message you again.
