The Comfort of Disappearing

I feel hollow in a way that is difficult to explain without making it sound smaller than it is. It is not an emptiness exactly, because emptiness would mean there is nothing left inside me. There is something there. I can feel it breathing beneath the numbness, something bruised and unbearably sad, curled up somewhere I cannot reach. Most days I can ignore it. I can move around it, speak over it, laugh loudly enough that even I almost believe I am fine. But then it returns without warning, like a visitor who has never learned how unwelcome they are. It slips through the cracks, sits beside me in the dark, and suddenly I remember that sadness never really left. It only learned how to be quiet.

And nights are always the worst.

There is something cruel about the hours when everyone else disappears into sleep and I am left alone with a mind that refuses to do the same. Every thought I managed to outrun during the day finds me again. Every feeling I buried starts clawing its way back toward the surface. My head becomes so loud that I can almost feel the noise beneath my skin, circling and circling until I would give anything for a little silence.

That is when I start missing it.

The thing that once looked so much like salvation that I mistook losing myself for being saved.

I hate admitting that.

I hate that something which nearly became my damnation can still live in my memory wearing the face of comfort. I hate how my mind edits out the ugliest parts when I am hurting. It does not show me the aftermath first. It does not remind me of the fear, the shame, the pieces of myself I had to collect afterward. No. It remembers the beginning. The softness. The quiet. The unbearable relief of finally not having to feel everything so violently.

And God, sometimes I miss that relief.

Not because I want the destruction that came with it. Not because I have forgotten what it did to me. I remember far too well.

I just miss the moment before the damage.

That brief, beautiful lie where everything stopped hurting.

There was a time when it felt like the only place I could rest. A small doorway out of myself. Somewhere I could go when being inside my own head became unbearable. I could step away from the sadness, the memories, the endless conversations with ghosts who never answered me back. For a little while, I did not have to carry myself. I did not have to understand what was wrong with me. I did not have to fix anything.

I could simply disappear.

And I think that is what terrifies me most now, some part of me still remembers disappearing as comfort.

My body remembers even when my mind knows better.

It remembers the quiet like hunger remembers food.

It remembers the absence of thought.

It remembers that strange warmth of no longer caring what was waiting for me when I came back.

So when the sadness becomes too heavy, I feel that old craving moving through me again – not loudly, not dramatically, but patiently. Like something sitting in the corner of the room, knowing eventually I will look in its direction. It does not have to beg me. It knows exactly which wounds to touch.

You remember how quiet I made you.

And I do.

That is the part I wish I could tear out of myself.

Because I know what happens after the comfort. I know how quickly escape becomes habit, how easily just this once becomes just one more time. I know how something can begin as a place you visit and slowly become the only place you feel safe. I know how frighteningly easy it is to stop noticing how much of yourself you are leaving behind each time you go there.

I have disappeared before.

Not physically.

Something worse.

I watched pieces of myself become quieter and quieter until I could barely recognize the person looking back at me. I lived inside my own life like a ghost who had forgotten whose body she was haunting. Days happened around me. People spoke to me. The world continued with all its unbearable normality while somewhere inside, I was slowly becoming less and less present.

And coming back was not some beautiful resurrection.

It hurt.

I had to learn how to feel things I had spent so long trying not to feel. I had to sit inside my own skin again. I had to meet the parts of myself I had abandoned and listen to everything they had been screaming while I was gone.

Some nights I still do not know whether I ever came back completely.

Maybe that is why this scares me so much.

Because tonight, with that hollow ache opening inside me again, I understand how easy it would be to reach for the thing that once made it quiet. I understand the temptation of surrendering to something that asks nothing from me except that I stop fighting myself for a little while.

And I am exhausted.

God, I am so fucking exhausted.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that sleep cannot touch – the exhaustion of constantly surviving your own mind. Of waking up carrying yourself and going to bed still carrying yourself and knowing that tomorrow you will have to lift the same invisible weight all over again. Sometimes I do not want answers. I do not want healing. I do not want another lesson about becoming stronger.

Sometimes I just want silence.

And that desire frightens me because I know where I used to find it.

I crave that old comfort like a drug that has already worn off but somehow left its memory inside my bloodstream. I know it cannot save me. I know it never did. Salvation does not ask you to destroy yourself as payment for a few hours of peace. Salvation does not slowly erase you and then call the absence relief.

But damnation rarely introduces itself honestly.

Sometimes it arrives gently.

Sometimes it holds you when nothing else will.

Sometimes it whispers, You can rest here.

And only much later do you realize it has been teaching you how to disappear.

That is why I am afraid to go back.

Because I know myself.

I know how desperately I can cling to anything that makes the hurting stop. I know how quickly I can confuse numbness with peace when sadness has been eating me alive for too long. I know there is a version of me buried somewhere beneath all this exhaustion that would trade almost anything for one night without the noise.

And I do not trust that version of me to know when enough is enough.

I am afraid that this time I would disappear deeper.

That I would go looking for a few hours of silence and wake up somewhere inside myself that I no longer recognize. That I would keep walking farther from who I am because turning around would require feeling everything again.

I am afraid I would become comfortable in the absence.

I am afraid the numbness would start feeling more like home than my own life.

Because I have already learned the dangerous truth about disappearing…

…the hardest part is not leaving.

It is remembering why you ever wanted to come back.

And some nights, when the hollow feeling settles beneath my ribs and sadness sits quietly beside me, I can feel that old doorway opening somewhere in the dark.

I know what waits behind it.

Comfort.

Silence.

Oblivion dressed beautifully enough to resemble mercy.

And I stand there missing it with every exhausted part of me, while being absolutely terrified of what would happen if I stepped through again.

Because I survived disappearing once.

I found pieces of myself scattered along the way and somehow carried enough of them home to keep living.

But I do not know how many pieces I have left to lose.

And I am terrified that if I disappear again,

there will not be enough of me left

to remember the way back.