the vanishing girl

“i don’t even know who you are anymore,” you tell me.

“oh, but i think you do,” i reply. “and i think that you are afraid of what you see;

i can feel that i have changed. i can feel it in my bones the way the sky can feel a storm–i have changed. i am no longer the pale, fragile, wide-eyed girl who would clench her hands into fists in her pockets when she didn’t agree with something, and i have grown out of biting my tongue when i have something to say. because, i used to be afraid of saying the wrong thing, and yet i always managed to say it anyway.

the girl i used to be was the girl that everyone else wanted her to be. she was a magician who had perfected her vanishing act long before she was born. her first act was hiding her heartbeat from the ultrasound technician when she was still in her mothers womb, her second was disappearing from that womb two months before she was due–both were acts that she nearly paid for with a life that she felt she had never earned.

so you see, she learned to shrink from a very young age, deteriorating more and more with every breath she took, she learned that this world likes its people small, and its women even smaller. maybe that’s why when she grew up she became a master of disguise, camouflaging herself in false smiles and the glow of the distant moon hiding the bitterness in her eyes as she tried to fall asleep. she took to avoiding mirrors and scales, anything that would make her something more or less than she was supposed to be, because she was afraid she would become the person who no one would want her to be–a person of her own creation with thunderstorms for eyes, and lightening on her tongue. she only ever wanted to be what others told her to be. she strung these expectations on a silver chain and wore them around her wrist, looking more like a shackle than a bracelet, always adding a new charm when one came her way. they were reminders for her, little flaws or imperfections that others had pointed out to her ‘for her own good’, like “no one likes a girl with opinions”, or “you’re not allowed to cry because it makes others uncomfortable”. it really couldn’t have been all that good if all it did was wipe her feet out from underneath her and snatch the breath from her lungs. whenever she glimpsed these faults within her being, she worked so hard to make them disappear that eventually, she disappeared too. she had performed the vanishing act so many times that she became it.

that was the girl you knew.

but

i

am

not

the vanishing girl

anymore.”

“i don’t know what to say,” you said.

“and that’s just it,” i told you, “you never did  .”

the-vanishing-girl

the vanishing girl

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

2 thoughts on “the vanishing girl

  1. I really loved reading this, and honestly I can connect with this in almost every way, except that I am not a girl. I was born two months early a day after my heartbeat wasn’t found. I could also consider that my first act of disappearance.

    But I also did belittle myself from a young age and I guess, well it most definitely did take a toll on me, completely effecting me up until a few months, or even weeks ago. Hope this again is marvelous, I do have a bias for this, but again give credit credit where it is due, right? Your style, i definitely loved it, especially how you went about spacing your last few words. That made this piece all the more powerful.

    Now I pose a few questions for you, did you intentionally leave you ‘I’ lowercase? because I remember once in my elementary that we were told to capitalize words like ‘I’ because they we are important; we are important. Did you leave them lowercase to give that opposite effect? and if so, why didn’t you start capitalizing towards the end? Personally I feel like that would’ve made it extremely powerful.

    I really want to thank you for writing this, i related (see what i did there) to this quite a lot, almost to every word, except ‘girl’, and you’ve never ceased to amaze me with you writing.

    ~Nilave

  2. Nilave,

    Thank you so much for your kind words-I really appreciate them!

    Now to answer your question; yes, the lack of capitals in this piece was a stylistic choice, not only to emphasize the ‘helplessness’ (that’s the only way I can explain it) of the piece, but also to give the overall story a softer look. I don’t know. To me, capitals have always just looked so harsh and sharp and proper, and so there is something about writing that doesn’t have capitals that kind of draws me in and makes me feel comforted. I love the incomplete kind of look, and I guess that I do this a lot in my writing because I write a lot about not being whole, incomplete, unfinished, etc. and to me it’s just kind of like “she is so broken that not even her writing is whole”. For this peice especially, because it is about my life (along with in some of my other writing), I like it to not have capitals because this is only part of the story of my life, if that makes sense. Capitals feel very definite and final, but my life has not been lived yet, and therefor this piece is a small part of me and my life. I continue to go on, just like this story with go with me.

    I hope I was able to competently answer your questions, and thank you again for your comment.

    -Hope

Leave a Reply to nilava Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *