mariana

It is not about fleeing out of fear, nor abandoning anything out of failure. It feels closer to an excess of lucidity. Sometimes existing becomes an unnecessary accumulation of gestures, of words, of thoughts that lead nowhere but back into themselves. A repetition. An echo that insists. And then that strange desire appears, almost elegant in its form, to dissolve. To no longer be a voice, nor a body, nor even a memory.

I think disappearing would not be an act, but a gradual renunciation. Like no longer underlining in a book until nothing remains marked. Like looking at the world without intervening in it, until the world, slowly, stops looking back at you. There is something seductive in that idea: not the end, but the suspension. Not death, but the absence of weight.

I wonder whether this impulse comes from exhaustion or from a distorted form of freedom. Because there is also a refusal in it: to participate, to define oneself, to occupy a place. To disappear would be, perhaps, the final gesture of autonomy. Not to be what is expected, not even what one has already become.

And yet there is a contradiction I cannot ignore. Because even in this desire to erase myself, I am still writing. I am still naming what I feel, giving it shape, and in doing so, betraying the very impulse to disappear. Perhaps writing is my way of staying at the edge: neither fully inside, nor completely outside. An unstable balance between existing and withdrawing.

I do not want to die. I know that with a steady, almost quiet clarity. But sometimes I do not want to wake up to the insistence of being someone, of having to continue being. And in that in-between space—where there is no urgency, no danger, only a kind of diffuse longing—I find myself more often than I would admit out loud.

Perhaps disappearing, in the end, is nothing more than a fantasy of absolute rest. A way of imagining silence without having to pass through the violence of an ending. An impossible pause.

I wonder whether this form of love — or attempt at love — is new, or whether it has simply found a different stage. Before, perhaps, intermittence was a letter that never arrived, a phone call that was never made. Now it is a message seen and not answered, a match that never turns into a body, a voice, shared time. The same waiting, but faster, more fragmented, harder to name because it happens so often that it stops feeling exceptional and begins to feel normal.

There are days when I feel that I am not the one choosing, but the one being chosen in small doses that are never enough to build anything. A “like,” a clever sentence, an early confession that promises depth. And then something in me opens — not completely, but enough — like a door that cannot decide whether to close or to invite someone in. And in that minimal gesture there is already a kind of offering, an expectation. It is not love, of course. But it is not nothing either.

What is most unsettling is not that it doesn’t work, but that at times it seems as if it could. That is the trap. Intermittence does not hurt because of its absence, but because of its incomplete appearances. The message that arrives just when I had decided to forget, the conversation that resurfaces with an intensity that feels sincere, almost urgent, only to disappear again without explanation. There is no closure, no clear conflict, no rupture: there is evaporation. And what evaporates is not only the other person, but also the version of myself that had begun to imagine herself in relation to them.

Sometimes I think what repeats is not the failure of connection, but my way of inhabiting it. There is a part of me that recognizes too late when something is only a possibility and not a reality. I cling to what could be with a kind of faith I do not apply in other areas of my life. It is strange: I am lucid in so many things, and yet here I accept fragments that do not even present themselves as fragments, but as ambiguous promises.

And in the middle of all this, the emptiness appears. Not a dramatic emptiness, not an intense sadness, but something subtler and more persistent: the feeling of not having arrived anywhere after so many attempts. Like walking a long distance only to realize I have been moving in circles the whole time. There is no story to tell, because no story ever fully begins.

Perhaps what is most difficult is that there is no one to blame. No one has done anything terrible. No one has promised what they could not fulfill, at least not explicitly. Everything unfolds in that blurred margin where things are never fully said, where each person interprets, projects, withdraws. And in that ambiguous space, the erosion is silent but real.

I would like to say that I will stop looking, that I will close these applications, that I will return to a slower, more tangible way of finding someone. But I am not sure I want to. There is something addictive in this constant possibility, in the illusion that the next conversation will be different, more solid, more real. As if the problem were not the system, nor even the others, but a kind of internal insistence that refuses to give up.

Maybe what I need is not to stop trying, but to learn to recognize sooner when something has no substance. Not to wait for it to disappear, not to justify intermittence as if it were mystery or depth. To call things by their name, even when that name is disappointing.

Because what weighs the most is not loneliness itself, but this interrupted form of company that never becomes enough. It is a hunger that turns on and off, but is never satisfied. And in that cycle, what slowly erodes is the ability to believe that something different is possible.

In The Possession, Annie Ernaux writes about how the mind can become occupied by an external presence, by the figure of another woman who turns into the center of everything, even without truly being known. It is not so much about who she is, but what she represents: replacement, the living proof that one story has been displaced by another. I recognize myself in that uncomfortable logic. I am not only thinking about him, but about her—about that other life now inhabiting a space that once felt like mine.

There is something deeply humiliating in this obsession, and yet it feels inevitable. As if the imagination must reconstruct the scene again and again, searching for a detail that might explain the inexplicable. What does she have? What did he see that I failed to give? Questions that are not really looking for answers, but instead serve as a way to remain attached, to avoid letting go completely.

What feels most disorienting is how this fixation reshapes time itself. Days no longer move forward naturally; instead, they orbit a single idea, as though everything were suspended in a kind of continuous present. Ernaux describes this occupation as something almost physical, an invasion. And that is exactly how it feels—as if something has taken hold of me, reducing my entire world to a single point of gravity.

Yet I sense a subtle difference beginning to emerge. In the book, this obsession is rendered with a kind of surgical clarity, as though observing it were already a way of mastering it. In my case, I am still inside it, caught in its unfolding. And still, the act of writing it—of putting it into words—creates a slight distance. As if naming it allows it to loosen, just a little.

Perhaps that is where a form of relief begins: not in abruptly ceasing to feel, but in transforming this occupation into something that can be narrated, something that can be observed from the outside. The pain does not disappear, but it shifts when it becomes language. And in that shift, however small, there is a quiet reclaiming of control.