Event

It was no great event. Her disappearance. No line in the paper. No police report. She went to a different town. Cut her hair off. Threw away her driving license. The photo in her wallet. Sat in the park unnamed. Unnameable. Looked at people. Do you even know I am disappeared? They didn’t. They walked by. She looked ordinary enough. From the outside. But the hands in her pocket shook. Itched. That feeling of not belonging. Of desperately trying to be. It scared her. That she could be behind the locked door of her nowhere flat for days and nobody would know. She left the curtains drawn. In the sun. In the day. She lay on the floor of the empty room looking at the ceiling. There was no grid reference to mark her existence. No shining arrow. There was no way of knowing where she was. If she was. She shouted out in her sleep. ‘Who am I?’ There was nobody to hear. Nobody to put an arm around her shoulder and say you are you. You are here. You are somebody. Just roll over in the dark room on her sore arms. Trying to push away the terrible things in her sore head. And the dizziness. The dizziness never went away. Nobody even guessed. She walked for mile after meaningless mile in a perfect straight line. She was passing out inside but she smiled at people. Cooed at babies and puppies. Looked at signs. Pressed the crossing light. She tried to cry behind the curtain because she knew that all those years of learning to fit in had made her more remote. You have to transmit the right signs and signals to show you are in trouble. Shoot your problems into the sky like a distress flare and hope for help to come. She wanted to tell people that it was a mistake. That she was not strong. That she was scared. Vulnerable. Human. She became this to survive. To survive them. I had to. I had to. If I had not been strong they would have known they had killed me. I am reaching out to you to tell you of my murder. But I do it in silence. I do it with no expression of remorse. I do it with no tears. No words.
She lies on the floor. She has made herself untouchable. Yet all she wants is to be touched. She wants to be at an event where people laugh and cheer and wish her to be.