Saturday Afternoon

Most people think being invisible would feel like freedom.
They imagine slipping through crowds unnoticed, eavesdropping without consequence, moving through the world untouched by judgment.
For me, it felt like disappearing from myself.
I didn’t wake up invisible one morning. There was no spark of light, no magic spell. It happened slowly — a fading. A soft erasing. First my fingertips blurred. Then my arms. Then the rest of me drifted into the background like smoke disappearing into air.
By the time a week passed, I was gone to everyone except myself.
Chapter 1 — The First Vanish
The first day I was entirely invisible, I tried to go to work. I pushed through the front door of the office, walked right up to my desk, and sat down.
No one noticed.
Not even when my chair moved.
Not even when I typed on my keyboard.
It was eerie — as if my presence carried no weight, no sound, no trace. Something in the universe had wiped me out of the equation.
I waved my arms.
I shouted.
I knocked a cup on the floor.
The cup rolled toward my coworker Evan’s foot. He looked down, puzzled, then shrugged and went back to typing.
I could move things.
But no one connected the movement to me.
I didn’t exist.
Chapter 2 — An Unseen World
As days turned into weeks, I learned the rules of invisibility:

1. People never look where you are, only where you were.
   It was like their eyes slid off me, unable to anchor on something their minds refused to register.
2. Doors open themselves if you’re not careful.
   A door slowly creaking open with no person behind it terrified more people than I expected.
3. Everyone speaks more freely when the room feels empty.
   I learned secrets I never wanted to know — bitterness whispered behind closed doors, longing confessed to no one, truths only said when people believed they were alone.
   I stopped listening.
   I stopped following people.
   And then I stopped trying to be seen.
   Chapter 3 — The Cost
   Invisibility looks painless from the outside.
   But it felt like this:

• No warmth. When someone passed through the space where I stood, their body left cold ripples in the air.
• No reflection. Mirrors showed empty rooms. Photos captured only the world around me.
• No touch. I held objects, but they never felt grounded. As if my fingers were made of mist.
  Sometimes I wondered if I was actually dying — slowly dissolving into something weightless, formless, forgotten.
  The worst part wasn’t that people didn’t see me.
  It was that people didn’t feel me.
  I walked through crowds and felt more alone than I ever had standing in an empty room.
  Chapter 4 — The One Who Noticed
  It happened on a rainy Wednesday.
  I was sitting on a park bench, listening to the rain strike the metal like tiny angry fingers, when a little girl stopped in front of me. She squinted, cocked her head, and frowned.
  “Why are you sad?” she asked.
  My heart lurched.
  She looked right at me.
  I hadn’t heard another human voice directed at me in months.
  “You… you see me?” I whispered.
  She shrugged. “Not really. But I feel like someone’s sitting there. Like a warm spot.”
  A warm spot.
  I had never felt warm since the day I disappeared.
  “What’s your name?” she asked.
  I told her.
  Her eyes widened for a moment — not at seeing me, but at hearing me.
  “I like your voice,” she said simply. “It sounds quiet.”
  Then her mother called her, and the child ran off.
  But those few seconds changed everything.
  Someone could sense me.
  Someone could hear me.
  Maybe… someone could bring me back.
  Chapter 5 — Becoming Real Again
  The next day, I returned to the park.
  And the next.
  And the next.
  Sometimes the girl came. Sometimes she didn’t. But each time she did, she spoke to me. She told me her name — Laya — and that she could always feel when someone was lonely.
  “Lonely people glow,” she said matter-of-factly. “Not on the outside. But in here.” She tapped her chest.
  Her ability wasn’t sight.
  It wasn’t hearing.
  It was something deeper.
  The more she talked to me, the more solid I felt.
  My hands didn’t blur as much.
  My voice didn’t echo so strangely in the air.
  The cold around me began to lift, replaced by softness.
  One morning, when I was gazing into a puddle after it rained, I saw something new:
  My outline.
  Faint. But mine.
  I exhaled shakily.
  I was coming back.
  Epilogue — Seen
  Months later, the first person who recognized me wasn’t Laya — it was Evan, my coworker. He blinked at me in shock.
  “Where have you been? We thought you quit!”
  I didn’t know how to explain. How to tell him I had spent half a year slipping between existence and nothingness.
  But as I stood there, under the fluorescent office lights, I felt something warm brush my hand.
  A child’s voice whispered in my memory:
  Lonely people glow.
  I wasn’t glowing anymore.
  I was visible.
  Seen.
  Real again.