How To Be Invisible

It is easier than you think. Live alone. Shun tv, hot water, your stove. Graduate. Become lost, angry at and tired with the world. Keep irregular sleep patterns. Watch the circles under your eyes darken. Drink wine out of the bottle. Nap constantly. Lose your wallet several times in quick succession, creating a paper trail layers thick.

This part is important: There will be moments, no matter how hard you try to avoid them, of human connection. A lady who smiles genuinely at you, an old man who says hello on the street, children. You must be vigilant, and resist the need to reciprocate. They’ll be hurt, but the alternative is far worse. The more you reject these moments the more you sever the things which truly make you who you are.

Pay in cash. Get a cellphone. Never answer it, and let the voicemail box get full. Drop and break it. Have your email account frozen for violating homeland security codes. Let the electricity go off in your apartment. Eat at the Cambodian deli and get sick. Avoid eye contact. If you must converse with others, stick to scripted responses. The attached scripts are for reference. Meditate on becoming an optical illusion. Try to position yourself in people’s peripheral vision.

You may also feel the need to understand what you are doing. Wrong.

Doing so means you think about yourself as existing, and this is a clear violation of the whole process. While you still labor under the illusion of your own tangibility, you will never achieve it. Ignore your neighbors. Stop dreaming. Curl up into a ball, slowly. Let yourself slowly rot from the inside. Take all mirrors out of your apartment; try to forget what you look like. If your hand becomes translucent, if your feet are suddenly see-through, it is working.

Keep friends at a distance, become horribly undependable. Fall in love, end it abruptly. Get a puppy, give her up for adoption. You must become numb to all emotions, to forget they are even there. If you cannot see them they cannot see you. Alienate your parents, old friends. Project such a terrible energy that strangers become visibly uncomfortable near you. Soon, all phone calls will cease. This is good.

You are becoming invisible because you are a poison, radioactive and deadly. It is not your fault, but you secrete it from your pores. Medical science can’t detect this creeping blackness that seeps from you, but nevertheless, it is lethal in high doses. The courteous thing to do is to quarantine yourself as you begin to fade away, as you cannibalize your own lymph nodes, cells, and organs. If you wish to save those you love, you must never ever let them see what you are now.