February the Fourteenth. Opus and the Daily Practice. Love.

When she was tired from keeping everything so real, Maricela had in the past played a game in which she would try to manifest a disappearance. Not a real disappearance. It was only a game really. The trick of the game was endurance. She would always ask herself, how bad do you want it? Can you change until the hangers-on, the boy, the friends at work or in your reading club, come loose?

She would change political parties and let them know it at work. She would stop waking up early to look ‘cute’ and begin wearing her brother’s old clothes. And stop putting contacts in, that’s when she would really become invisible. Unapproachable. Truly dissonant. If that did not knock at least a few people out of her friends list, she would quit her job altogether. She had done it before and considered doing it again. It was not hard to find something she liked better than working the dispatch switchboard–listening to all those people alone, asking her for help while she sat in a chair on a linoleum floor with shoe streaks in it.

If she was still playing the game after the job, she might change her name, Maricella reasoned. She had done so twice before. It was a bitch but it always felt rewarding to have your name called different by a stranger who did not know the difference. That new name sound. If she was still playing and the partner still coming, or texting, or inviting her to dinner, she would switch phone numbers so the gulf between her and everyone else could be a protective shell.

Once Maricela played the game, so long that Luke came to the door to pound on it when he found his keys did not work in the new lock. Out in the hallway, he began to shout and cuss about the dirty things they had done together so that her neighbors would know. And Luke told her she was trash and a crazy-burn-out-flake-bitch who would never be anything. But that did not matter. He was not screaming at her. He was not disappointed about, or angry with, or murderous at Maricela. Luke wanted to kill someone, named Daphne, whom she only knew distantly. Someone Luke could never know at all. FDM