Have You Ever Just Wanted to Disappear?

Leave, without a trace.

Photo by Daniel K Cheung on Unsplash

A few years ago, I wanted to disappear. Blinded by the glare of a white screen, I scoured forums and downloaded books and read accounts from former federal agents who prattled on about how hard it was to truly disappear in a society where your every waking moment is recorded, filmed, tracked, and listened to.

But it is possible. To disappear. To witness protection yourself. Dare to step away from your life as you know it.

First, they said, you had to get rid of your phone. You could get a flip phone, but even that’s dangerous, a Reddit user wrote. Because they can still find you. In the 80s you could’ve done it. Hell, you could’ve went on a murder rampage and drive around with the bodies in the back of your pick-up. You think Ted Bundy was smart? No, there were no phones, no DNA, no surveillance state. Also, police were plain stupid.

The deeper you dive into these forums, you find paranoia and bizarre sequiturs in the crevices. People who’ve taken a kernel of truth and made a bomb of it. And the thing that once arrested them, spooked them, becomes unrecognizable. Google on your phone becomes the eye that watches you while you sleep.

There’s a woman who works at a Goodwill where I shop. We’ve become friendly and she calls me Gina. Perhaps she didn’t hear my name when I yelled it over the racks while twenty-somethings film TikToks in front of store mirrors. I don’t correct her. Even when a friend and I are shopping and she calls me Gina and my friend’s face rearranges itself. Why is she calling you that? I say I don’t know.

Correcting her now, after all this time, feels wrong to me. Or maybe I like setting down the weight of my name, all my history, and taking on the skin of someone new. I don’t like the name Gina, but I’ll take it. I’ve gotten used to it. It’s not too different from when my mother called me Lisa instead of my real name for the whole of my life. Lisa. Given to me by a man she married who couldn’t pronounce Felicia. Lisa seemed easier for everyone. A middle ground.

I still dream of disappearing. Not because I’m tired or tin-hat-level-paranoid, or feeling the deepest hue of blue. More like it’s a feeling of being free. Of not being shackled to your name, the fingerprints of the life you’ve lived, the words and images that are forever engraved online. The marks you leave feel indelible. When we’re young we were frightened of the words this will go on your permanent record. But now that’s all we do, live our permanent record. We wake and fall asleep to it. We build social media profiles and platforms as a totem to it, and ask the legions to like, heart, clap, and adore.

This morning I watch videos about a famous TikTok beauty influencer who always seems embroiled in some sort of controversy. Her bombastic caricature of a Boston accent is grating. The makeup appears cartoonish. She parades out gifts from brands and shows off her finery and she’s barely twenty-four. For hours, I watch her videos and response videos, tea channels and news reports and it feels as if I’m sitting in a theater watching a horror movie. Because that’s what social media feels like to me — vulgar, horrifying. Devastatingly permanent.

And if it’s not social media it’s the world outside our doors that’s incredibly loud and violently close. Encroaching our safe spaces. Slipping into our homes and spreading pain like sickness. We witness the horrors of the world and somehow have become immune to it because we can barely tolerate the horror that is our everyday.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to live in a fiction where you can crawl into an igloo — even if it’s for a minute. Just for a little while let there be some quiet.

I imagine one day waking and packing a bag and taking my cat and slipping into the ether. Delete all the profiles. Cut all the cards. Torch and cinder the phone. The dream of it feels like a liberation, a death of a former life. A death that affords you a do-over, an awakening. A death where you’re still living but the burden of you, the weight of the life you’ve carried, is discarded.

But I don’t do it because…I don’t know. I have student loan payments, IRS payments, thousands of words published in online spaces. Obligation tethers me while the idea of leaving liberates me.

Still, I spend hours reading books and sleuthing the smaller spaces. Reading the stories of people who have done it or dream of it. Reading stories of people living lives of quiet desperation. People who are trying to figure out whether they’re running away from something or to something.