Why can’t they see themselves in me?
You asked the same question about Holly Decker in seventh grade.
I want to build them all a life-sized model of my world. I want to sell tickets. “Experience the life of Diana for five fucking minutes!”
They projected your image on a screen bigger than the moon the earth the sun, and you are not of your body or of dust anymore.
They wanted me to live like a normal person. I had a job. $30k a year. $2,500 in bills every month. A child. No support system. An apartment that I was proud of. That I kept clean and organized even when I was exhausted. Even when I had two jobs. Had to keep it all together. Had to be stable, being beaten and raped every second, invisible in plain sight.
Why wouldn’t they see?
You lived in a false reality.
A gun held to my head.
Remember that nice young blonde couple with the big dog in the apartment across the hall. How standoffish they became and you knew it was because of the weird and distressing noises coming from your apartment. And one day they disappeared quietly. Moved out.
Soon tourists moved in everywhere. I was surrounded by transients, perpetual vacationers there to witness the breakdown of my humanity.
They all worked for the show for the purpose of testing a person’s ability to withstand shunning by the entire living world. They were a community of everyone but YOU specifically. Unless they were bullying you, inconveniencing you, following you, stalking you, harassing you, verbally assaulting you, taking your picture, provoking you, trying to steal from you, successfully stealing from you, trying to fuck you rape you kill you. Immolate you to see if your charcoal body would reanimate and go on tour.
I am a revoked offer, I am a non-thing. I am the absence of existence.
You never knew what being seen meant.
Except that one time. The rape wouldn’t stop. I was trying to work in between taking Maya to school and picking her up from school, and the rape wouldn’t stop. I remember screaming. Crying. Raging. Begging.
And a flock of geese landed on the roof above you and honked with you for some time.
Connection. Community. Because my own kind wouldn’t see me.
You’re just too big. It’s not their fault.
Whose fault is it? Why won’t they see me?
Beyond the abysmal walls, you’ll understand.
It’s because they’re not looking hard enough.
It’s the luck of the draw. The way the cookie crumbled.
To become so enormous, so ubiquitous, that you’re invisible.
To die without dying. To vanish without vanishing and no one can see you except with their roasting fists and you have to pretend you exist even though they’ve killed you.
I am dead and alive. I am the zeitgeist.
Companion Video:
Diana Spindler 