The Disappearing Act

I have done this to every person who has ever loved me.

Just gone. Phone face-down. Door closed. Not for an hour. Sometimes a whole day. Sometimes longer than I meant to, because once I’m in the quiet I can’t make myself come back out. Coming back out means being a person again and I am so tired of being a person.

I know what it looks like. It looks like rejection. It looks like you did something wrong. It looks like the slow fade everyone warns you about on the internet.

That’s not what’s happening. But I understand why you’d think so.

What’s actually happening

Three days of texting all day, calling at night, being present, tracking every conversation, reading every tone. And then something just. Goes. I can feel it happen. Like a fuse blowing. One minute I’m fine, the next minute the idea of answering a text makes me want to crawl under furniture.

And it’s not enough to be alone. I need to be unperceived. There’s a difference. If someone is in the next room I’m still performing. Even just sitting on the couch doing nothing, if someone knows I’m there, some part of me is still on. Still managing how I look, how much space I’m taking up, whether I seem okay.

I need everyone to forget I exist for a bit. That’s the thing I can never figure out how to say.

The guilt

Here’s what makes it worse.

I know I should text first. Just a quick “I need to go quiet for a while, it’s not you.” Five seconds. But by the time I need the silence I’ve already used up everything I have. Sending that text requires the exact thing I’ve run out of. So I just stop. And then from inside the silence I start writing apologies in my head. Rehearsing what I’ll say when I come back. Calculating how angry everyone is. Which is exhausting, which means I need more silence, which means the gap gets longer.

By the time I resurface I’ve already convicted myself. I am, apparently, someone who doesn’t deserve to be loved because I can’t even manage a text message.

I know this cycle. I’ve done it with friends, partners, family. The ones who stayed are the ones who figured it out on their own, mostly, because I couldn’t explain it. I still can’t really explain it.

I don’t have a solution

I wish I did. I’ve tried the code word thing. The signal. The emoji that means “still here, just can’t.” Sometimes I manage it. Sometimes I don’t.

What I’m sitting with right now is that this costs other people something. Not just me. And I don’t know what to do about that yet.