Thereās a thought that has been sitting in my chest for far too long, growing louder with every passing day: I want to vanish from everything.
Not just leave for a while, not just take a vacation, not just mute the noise, I want to disappear completely. I want to erase myself from the map of peopleās memories, from the phone contacts, from the photographs where my face sits in the corner. I want to dissolve out of conversations, slip out of stories, be a ghost in the lives I once belonged to.
Itās not that I hate everyone. Itās not even that I hate myself. Itās just that I feel suffocated by the sheer weight of being known. Every face that greets me carries with it a memory of me, an old version, an expectation, a fixed idea of who I am. And I canāt breathe under the heaviness of it. I donāt want to keep performing the same character in the play of my life just because the people in the audience think they know the script. I want to step out of the theatre altogether.
I imagine what it would feel like to walk away without warning. To take nothing with me except the clothes on my back and maybe a single book. To leave my phone on the table, buzzing endlessly with questions Iāll never answer. To watch my old self fade from peopleās timelines, slowly becoming āthat person we used to know.ā And to know, secretly, that somewhere else, Iām still alive just no longer theirs.
Sometimes, in my daydreams, I go further. I picture the new life in painful, delicate detail. A small rented apartment with peeling wallpaper, the kind that smells faintly of old rain. A window that looks out onto a narrow street where vendors shout in a language I only half understand. A kettle on the stove, steam rising as the only sound in the room. A second-hand table where I sit in silence, eating breakfast with no phone, no interruptions, no one asking where Iāve been. That silence, that silence is what I ache for.
I want to be a stranger. To walk into grocery stores where nobody smiles in recognition. To sit in a library where nobody knows the shape of my handwriting. To cross a bridge at night and disappear into a crowd of strangers who donāt care where Iām going. To be free from the unspoken chains of familiarity.
Because here, in this life, Iām always being pulled back. Every corner I turn holds a reminder: of who I was, of what I said, of who I disappointed, of who I used to be before I outgrew myself. Itās exhausting to live in a place where your own shadow feels heavier than your body. What would it be like to live somewhere where my shadow is new? Where even the streets have no memory of me?
I want to unlearn myself. To forget the sound of my own name. To see how I would move in a world where nobody is watching, where nobody expects me to be brave, kind, funny, smart, successful, all the words people use to pin me down like a butterfly on a board. I want to fly away before the pin reaches me.
Sometimes I wonder: is this selfish? To want to abandon the people who have loved me, who have invested pieces of themselves in me? To vanish without explanation, leaving behind unanswered questions? But then I think maybe itās more selfish to stay. To keep living a version of myself that feels like a performance, just because itās convenient for everyone else. Maybe the truest kindness I can offer myself is freedom, even if it looks like abandonment to others.
And yet, the longing doesnāt stop at silence. I donāt just want to vanish, I want to be reborn. I imagine walking into a city where no one knows me and building myself from the ground up. Maybe Iād change my name. Maybe Iād dye my hair. Maybe Iād work at a bookstore, or wash dishes in a cafĆ©, or paint houses just to keep my hands busy. And in the evenings, Iād write. Iād write not for an audience, not for validation, not to be remembered, but just to empty myself out. To bleed my thoughts into notebooks that nobody will ever find. That sounds like peace to me.
I think about the rhythm of this life:
Waking up early and walking to a bakery to buy bread. Sitting on park benches watching strangers pass by, inventing lives for them in my head. Riding buses to the far ends of the city just to see where they go. Coming home to my little apartment, where the only sound is the dripping of a leaky faucet. Reading books late into the night, underlining lines nobody will ever see. Falling asleep knowing that no one will check if I made it home.
That loneliness terrifies me, and yet it calls to me like a song. Because here, surrounded by familiarity, I feel more alone than I ever could in a city of strangers. At least there, my loneliness would be pure. At least there, my silence would belong to me.
But then reality claws back in. The truth is, even if I vanish, I canāt escape myself. I can change my name, my location, my story, but I will still carry me. The wounds, the regrets, the quiet ache of being human. Maybe what Iām yearning for isnāt really a new place, but a new skin. A way to shed the heaviness of everything Iāve been through until now.
Still, I canāt stop dreaming. I canāt stop picturing myself walking through some unnamed city where the air feels lighter because it doesnāt know me. Where every step feels like the first. Where I can finally ask myself, without fear, who am I when no one else is watching?
Maybe one day Iāll do it. Maybe one day Iāll buy the ticket, pack a single bag, and vanish into the life Iāve been aching for. Maybe one day Iāll step off the train into anonymity and feel the chains fall off my chest. Maybe one day Iāll stop being haunted by myself.
Until then, I live here with the ache, with the longing, with the endless dream of vanishing. I carry it like a secret flame, burning quietly inside me. And maybe, in some strange way, that longing itself is what keeps me alive. The knowledge that another life is possible, even if I never take it. The whisper that I donāt always have to stay.
I want to vanish from everything. And if I canāt, then Iāll keep writing about it until the words themselves feel like an escape.
If my words have kept you company in your own quiet moments, and youād like to support me, you can buy me a coffee hereā.
I also wrote a little book called āFor All the Wrong Reasons.ā
Itās about a girl who moves to a small autumn town called Maplewoodā¦ only to find herself falling for her roommateās boyfriend. Itās a story about wanting someone you probably shouldnāt, and all the messiness that follows.
If youāre a member of Hasifās Porchlight Club ($3/month), you can read it for free.
Or, you can grab it on its own for $5.
I do want to disappear into thin air and live the rest of my life by the beach in a small cottage but here I am dreading deadlines and hoping miraculously everything makes sense. Everyone I've known or loved has already limited to a defination of someone they think I am. No one will ever get you, including yourself. Sometimes I really wish that someone would just look at me know what runs my mind in the very moment, or the way I stop mid sentence. Everything is so repetitive like a routine running down my veins it's mundane and boring not that I need drama but there is for sure absence of peace. I guess there is comfort in the process of 'becoming' where each ending leads up to a new beginning.
yes.. I feel that need to disappear, to vanish completely.. this spoke to the very depths of my soul