By Alexandra Naughton
originally published by Cosmonauts Avenue, November 2017
I tell you it’s okay, and you won’t think it again, but I’ve already filed it away to torture myself with whenever I want to bring myself down a notch. Another little trophy to take home from a plot against myself.
I’ve wanted to disappear, just be nothing. It’s so alluring to feel like nothing and then actually be like nothing, but still be present. Like it’s an ideal, a fiction. It’s only something you can try to do.
I’m writing out only the parts I like to remember.
I can be nothing, like how I feel at parties: you can see me but I’m not there. Colors and sounds wash over me like I’m miniature, standing inside of a pinball machine feeling lost and everything’s banging around and lighting up and making noise and I keep turning my head to try to keep up like a floating dust particle to focus on.
I can be invisible inside the chattering cacophony of a sweaty crowd, covered in so much, too much. I can block me out and lose me.
I can make my expressions invisible, like friends really don’t even get it, so I try to describe it calmly while getting brushed off and eventually overheating but frozen on the outside like a surprised animal about to get hit by a car that other people talk about and it sounds unbelievable until you see it yourself, until you are that animal in the crosswalk.
You, my new you of the moment, the you who finds me waiting for a friend at a coffee shop, the you who finds me online where I post my thoughts, you tend to like me better when I’m bendable, when I don’t voice preferences. You like me better when I open myself up for your inspection. All laid out on the asphalt, straddling me and wetting yourself in my cold sweat. Asking so many questions, wanting to know things that I don’t. You like poking at my soft parts. Pulling meat out and squishing it in your fingers like plastic wrapped factory bread. Examining me, taking me apart out of curiosity and discarding when it gets too messy and you’re just over it. Starting something you don’t want to finish or put back.
You can shrink me, make me feel small. You can empower yourself that way. Lean on me until you’ve sunken me into the mud and I’m stuck there for a while. Make me invisible that way, that ordinary way you do. That subtle way you do. Make me not know myself, make me lose myself so you can find yourself.
Make everything feel invisible like you’re not as nice as you think you are. So accustomed to taking up space, making yourself loudest. Make me invisible like I made a joke and only you heard me, so you said it louder and everyone laughed. Like this happens so often I wonder if I am even speaking out loud sometimes, start gaslighting myself, under some invisible control. Make me invisible for your satisfaction. It’s a secret, not something you would share.
Make all the efforts of others invisible because it isn’t cool to care but you are still the only one who matters and if you’re unhappy then we’re all unhappy. Waysided because even though I am neglecting what matters to me to better suit you it is still not enough. Getting projected onto. And at first I am happy to be whatever you want me to be. I offer myself up freely, willingly. You ask and I oblige. And I’m happy to, at first. Because I’m not sure what to do besides listen and trust you.
Why make invisible always my first choice, my go to? I guess I’ve always wanted to be a ghost. I guess I’ve always tried to make myself smaller. Make it harder for people to find me.
Make it easier, existing on an at-will basis. Silently watching, listening, wandering around aimlessly, and enjoying it unseen. Easier to slip away.
What am I saying here? Something about commodification of the flesh. Something about finding it customary. Something about being just another bitch who is feeling things.
Is there subtext here? Maybe we should workshop it. Let it become someone else’s text. Edit me out, flesh and all.
Invisible like something insidious. Invisible like destitute. Invisible like displacement. Invisible like disassociation and you think I’m just being dramatic. Invisible and there is no one who can help. Invisible and no one can hear you scream, or they hear but no one looks up. Invisible and you know they can see you, they’re just pretending they can’t.
Invisible and they’re laughing about it.
Alexandra Naughton is the author of ten poetry collections. Her first novel, American Mary, won the 2015 Mainline contest by Civil Coping Mechanisms and was published in 2016. Her work has been featured in Dusie, Sporklet, sin cesar, Maudlin House, carte blanche, and elsewhere. She writes Talk About It on Substack, and organizes the Bring A Blanket reading series in Philadelphia. Find her on instagram @alexandranaughton and twitter @alexandranaught