The Girl Who Became Invisible

There is this girl who is so socially awkward; she wishes she would disappear. She goes to social gatherings; (and she is invited to a lot of them, somehow through a combination of misfortune, her job, which incidentally is of a PR person, which is quite ironic in itself, and her social circle-because she has a set of good friends-she is not awkward one to one, and she is not a bad person-she is just afraid of large crowds/gatherings she is expected to be part of, she cannot carry a party on her own, in fact she can barely speak in a group of five unless it is a prewritten speech), so she goes to a lot of social gatherings and skulks in a corner, nursing a drink which nursing she continues till the end of the gathering or till such time as it polite to leave the gathering, never finishing the drink (because it might cause the social necessity of having to get herself another, and thus forcing upon her the necessity of having to make her way through a crowded bar, thus dealing with  people). And this is how her social life normally flows and she hates it, and she wishes there was a way whereby she could gracefully evade this charade, this constant need of people to stay connected with each other, that she could just become like a black hole at any social gathering she is invited (that particular wish lasts for only as long as she realizes that black holes are dark but in fact huge points of gravitation and attract a hell of a lot of things) and so she only wishes to be invisible.

Eventually, as it often happens in such stories, at once such social gathering, she again goes off to skulk in a relatively quiet corner of the garden in which the gathering is being organized, to find a relatively quiet chair on which to sit down and nurse her drink till the end of the party, and when she reaches her corner, she finds that it is already occupied by one slightly lost looking young man whose looks like something the cat brought in, and seems to be even more ill at ease than her. She anyways goes and sits there in an unprecedented burst of courage, or maybe because she is not really afraid to face a one to one conversation or maybe because the young man seems even more at sea than she is, and she, mysteriously, of all the emotions she could feel about this young man, is feeling protective about him.

Anyway, that is how it goes. After a few frosty moments punctuated only by the clink of ice against glass as they both earnestly stare into their whiskey and try to be unaware of the other’s presence, they eventually get talking, get their drinks finished and the young man in an act of gallantry probably unprecedented in his life, and one that visibly tortures him insists on getting her another drink and they keep on talking. And that is how that night passes.

It is around this time that the most secret of the girl’s wishes begins to come true, she slowly begins to fade. She notices it in the mirror one morning, as she prepares to face the world again, that her likeness in the mirror is hazy, the features do not seem to be as distinct as she remembers them, and this experience becomes like looking at an ages-old, faded photograph. She does not understand what has happened, but does not pay much attention to it because she is in a hurry. She runs into the young man at a few more gatherings, and he remarks that she looking faint, and enquires after her health, and she remarks a bit coquettishly (she thinks) that they are running into each other with an alarming frequency, isn’t it, and wonders loudly if it is all merely a coincidence, to which the young man says that if it is, then it is surely a pleasant one (he thinks) and so, eventually they begin to see each other outside their social obligations (and the young man confesses that not everything was a coincidence and she laughs a bit, before he becomes serious again and earnestly enquires if everything is all right about her because she is increasingly acquiring a dream like quality about her). The girl now faces the mirror every morning with a bit of obsession and not a small amount of fear, and she changes mirrors three times in ten days but the results are no different, indeed the world still retains its sharp contours and colors, it is her likeness which seems to grow vaguer day after day. Indeed, she has noticed that as she continues to fade away day after day, the boy’s outline seems to become even sharper by the day to her; she can see all the colors of his hair as the light dances through them, she imagines she can see shifting variations on the color of his eyes depending on the way he looks at her, every color of his shirt seems to have acquired a new vibrancy, she can see the color of his hand (pale) and of the veins under his skin (dark, almost black). And she worries. And so the story goes.

Until this day. The girl finds herself sitting at a cold metal bench in a cold subway station, oblivious to the crowds milling around her as most of them are oblivious of her, of her insubstantiality, of the miasmic storm of feelings which is rising all around her, of the almost-imaginary tears that line her eyes, on the near helplessness of the situation. She has just parted from the boy, who is happy now that her health seems to be getting restored, that he can see her better, the vague, dopey, shimmering air of nothingness that has been following her has been absent for the first time tonight. The boy has told her that he can see her for what she is really, that he can see the beautiful person she really is, and that the touch of her hands as soft as the sound created by a falling feather, and that a look from her eyes is as beautiful as child laughing in his sleep, and that he loves her. Very much. She sits there on the subway bench and cries and cries and cries, silently, as oblivious of all the hundreds of people who are swirling around her in one formless mass as they are of her, and makes up her mind. The train is coming.