It doesn’t take much to start disappearing. You won’t even notice it at first. Your siblings, one by one, will leave home for college. You knew this would happen. The cluttered mound of shoes at the front door trickles down into three neatly sorted pairs. Dinners with your parents become brief and almost conversationless. They used to be a messy, furious, hilarious, winding event, but now they are just an obstacle. You want to get back to your room to finish your homework so you can resume writing your Percy Jackson fanfiction. Your parents want to recline in their individual recliners and fall asleep to Young Sheldon.
You go to college a state away because it is the only university that gives you a decent scholarship and you need to leave home, to be anywhere but here. Your dormmate has two ferrets. You’ve never seen a ferret before, let alone two. She spends more time out drinking with friends, so you spend your nights scraping off the hardened clusters of shit tucked in the corner of the litter box because you are sick of your room and clothes smelling like sweaty fur with a hint of shit behind it, and she won’t do it so you just do it. You fantasize about putting the ferret cage up to the trash chute and hoping they jump down. You hope the semester ends so you can go back home for winter break. Two weeks. After all that effort to leave, it only took two weeks for you to want to tuck tail and run home.
You drive home every weekend to spend time with your friends who all went to the state college together. They lounge in the sofas at each other’s apartments like it’s their place too. They have a board game night every Wednesday and go hiking on the weekends. All without you. They’re doing better without you, actually. The one friend you made on campus working at the dining hall hasn’t responded to your texts in over a month.
The further you get into your major, the more the work becomes meaningless. The more you hate how shallow your classmates are. How uninspired your professors are. You’re terrified you’ll become them. But you took on too much debt, took too many classes, and are so close to graduating by the time you figured that out. So you stick it out until you graduate. You tell yourself that college wasn’t for you. Too much socializing. Too loud. Adulthood is where you’ll thrive. It’ll get better. It has to.
You take a job even further from home because after 179 applications, only four responded and only one offered you a job. The city is humungous. The people at work never look each other in the eye. They wear watches worth more than your car but constantly complain about inflation and taxes. They all have children and spouses they avoid by working well into the night. Their multiple emails from the weekend and questions asking why you haven’t responded yet are always waiting on Monday morning. You try to make small talk with them, but their flat corporate voices and disinterest for anything but work doesn’t translate. You ask to work from home because you can’t take walking into work at 6:30 a.m., sitting down until 5:15 p.m., and not saying a word to anyone. They agree all too quickly.
Your first apartment has a modern, simple design. Being able to afford this place is one of the small joys of selling out. It’s empty, so you fill it. First with your furniture from college, then with sprawling vines and wide emerald leaves and framed posters of Tarantino movies and black and white photography of landscapes and oceans you’ve never seen. But none of it helps. You can sit on the couch in absolute silence, and nothing will happen. Your brother won’t come stomping down the stairs. Your sister won’t give you a hug while you’re eating breakfast. Your mom won’t ask if you want to go for a walk after dinner. It’s just you, in all this space, in all this silence. You wonder who would notice first if you slipped in the shower and didn’t get up. Probably your boss. Even then, it might take her a day or two. You think, if you’re the only one who knows you’re here, it’s almost like you don’t exist.
Your friends come to visit. Check out your new city. Your new life. But you don’t have anywhere to take them besides the ramen shop beneath your apartment. So you sit in your apartment, not chatting as easily as you used to, as you half-heartedly roll the dice of Yahtzee while they tell you about how great things are going. And they are going great. One just got their dream job in New York. You overdo your celebration of the news so they don’t see the panic in your eyes. Someone you know, who is from the same place as you, the same age as you, did almost the same things as you growing up, is suddenly more successful than you, further ahead than you. Then the two who are engaged show you their rings, which shine like beacons of light that keep the fog of loneliness away. You can’t remember the last date you went on. The last time you even felt a flicker of passion for someone else. You suddenly want someone to hold you. Just hold you. Their arms putting a pressure around you that keeps you from slipping away.
Your parents can’t work their new phones as well, so they call you less. When you do connect, their voices are distant. Not that they aren’t interested in you, but your brother had a baby and your sister is buying a house and there are just more important things going on right now. You’re fine, right? You got a great job, a nice big place, some money to spend, a 401K. You can’t complain. They sacrificed so much to give you all of this. So you tell them you’re fine. Because to them, you should be.
At your quarterly performance review, your boss tells you you’re doing a great job. That they are pleased with your work, and you will even get a substantial raise. You don’t know how this is possible. You’ve been taking longer and longer lunches. You forgot to turn in reports multiple times. You take ages to respond to emails. You haven’t been able to string together a decent afternoon of focus for the last eight months. And yet, it doesn’t seem to matter. Why isn’t she mad at you? Why aren’t they firing you? You hoped they would. It would force you to do something. She asks if you have any questions for her before she goes to her next meeting, which started four minutes ago. No, you don’t have any.
You are sitting on the lumpy couch you bought sophomore year of college for $150 off a neighbor who was moving out and you wonder how many more nights you’re going to spend on this couch watching YouTube videos of people traveling to a remote village in Iceland or playing with their beautiful children in their mansion with their sexy spouse while your butt starts to ache from the misshapen springs pressing into your flesh and nothing ever changes. You try to remember the last person you saw. The last time you spoke out loud. You say a word. The muscles in your throat grate against each other, unable to find any friction, until your voice cracks open.
The art that appears alongside this piece is “The Land & Me #1” by JONATHAN KENT ADAMS.