Disappearer
Don’t believe that it’s impossible to disappear. It is. Don’t believe that it’s impossible to step off this whirling world for a few precious breaths, or even longer, and excuse yourself from the screaming hubbub, the voices in your head, the doubts in your soul, the banal and the everyday. It is.
Your route is lined with gaudy hoardings, each of them lighting your path. Follow the subterranean rumble even as your skin resists the heat and noise and your mind tries to rebel against the claustrophobia. Nervousness may well descend in the shape of ticking and twitching, but keep walking the gloomy, unfamiliar corridors and lightly dragging your fingers along the damp walls until you find the door. Open it nervously, step inside, close it behind you. You’re gone.
Stand at the stained and streaked window and pretend that you can almost see your house from here. Gaze down at the city’s patchwork and know that at this moment, you are just one anonymous number amongst the teeming masses. No one can see you up here. No one ever raises their eyes in this direction, since everyone is trapped inside their solitary sphere and too intent on reaching their own destination. Hidden behind these misty panes and fluttering curtains, you only exist for one pair of eyes.
Freeze five seconds so that they last for an hour, freeze five minutes so that they last until dawn. Press play and let the spectral essence fill the darkened room, increasing in intensity until the speakers are blown and you fall to the floor. Then repeat the process so that moment after moment after moment is drawn apart and rent asunder. Don’t even give this music the slightest pause before hitting rewind and starting all over again. Give yourself up to the glorious noise and swim towards the sound of submerged strings, drifting in the salty water and sucking in deep breaths of the elsewhere.
And all the while, you wonder if you are really here, if this is really happening, if you have really disappeared. The answer only comes as sunlight invades your tired, heavy-lidded eyes come morning, and you step out onto the baked and burning concrete to rejoin the human race.