Girl, Missing
I have always been drawn to stories of getting lost and disappearing. In my childhood, it was the quite common fantasies of discovering secret worlds, parallel universes and backwards time travel – dissolving into somewhere away from reality.
When I got older, these wistful tales transformed into more morbid intrigues of darker disappearances, mysteries of lost people who didn’t come back, who didn’t find magic or new lands or friends.
Particularly, they were about other girls disappearing.
High school girls walking in dark woods and not returning. Women trapped in back alley noir-ish nightmares. Road trips descending into surreal horror. Podcasts on paranormal encounters of the most unsettling kinds.
One of my most cherished books is Hangsaman, a story by Shirley Jackson about a college girl who, after a series of quite dark, intimate friendships with other women, goes on a walk into the Vermont hills alone. Her journey is marked by very strange encounters where no one quite speaks to her as a normal human. A man with one arm in a coffee shop stares at her hungrily. Her friend reads her tarot cards in a bath together, kisses her, before admitting she wants to die. A bus driver tells her how dangerous it is to travel to the last stop, alone.
Slow, haunting descents into invisibility constantly preoccupy my mind.
I went to an all-girls secondary school. It wasn’t anything particularly exciting, not a 200-year-old Edwardian building tucked behind topiaries and curled iron gates. It was just a very normal, run of the mill state school, about 10 minutes from my house.
On the stretching walks back and forth from school, other neighbouring schools would sometimes taunt us by shouting things at the bus stops. Most commonly, because every student there happened to be a girl, we were
the ‘dyke’ school.
When you’re at school you really need to do everything you can to fit in and not be noticed. We would shout back things like ‘fuck off’ and that ‘we’re not gay, they are’. My friends would laugh at the thought of any of us fancying girls, what a stupid idea, imagine that, they must be gay for calling us gay! Hahaha, I would laugh too, how ridiculous, how untrue.
But really, I was becoming aware that I was perhaps a bit different. It had been happening for a while really, though maybe I wasn’t consciously noticing at first. Maybe I hadn’t realised that my childhood preoccupations with secret worlds, fantasy narratives, did not often most closely look at usual romance, or happily ever after story archs of the main protagonists. Why was it exactly I was, instead, so obsessed, even jealous, of Ed mund’s kidnapping by the white witch in Narnia? Why had Sleeping Beauty’s forced spellbound slumber by Maleficent been fixated in my mind with such elated intrigue, rather than fear…?
I hadn’t really connected the dots until certain things came into focus when I was a bit older.
Adolescence at an all-girl’s school is acutely defined by its social aspects – a complex web of gossip, scandals, hushed giggles and sometimes quite disorderly PE changing room clashes. Quite a lot of these surrounded dating.
Who fancied who, sexual encounters, even scathing speculation on who might be…you know, gay. And that’s the last thing you want to be, the focal point of a scandal.
I’m not Gay.
I would think,
over and over and over.
And so the disappearing acts began.
I’d look at the images of men my friends showed me, causing so much excitement, and every time I’d just see a wooden board, a cardboard-cutout person, like a diagram you’d have to look at in biology class, or in a paper dress up doll book.
I’d try to understand this attraction, but found my mind could only transplant the male heartthrob in question with a plethora of ethereal, or regal, or graceful women, I’d nod and agree, and then it would be easy to simply reply:
I was very lucky, really, not to be at a school with boys. I didn’t have to feign any real-life crushes, and god forbid physical relationships. I only needed to hide behind a façade of celebrity images. The rest of the time I could slip quietly into an alternate reality, gazing out of the window of my German class to the crows wandering the football field. I find myself picturing me, as someone a bit older and more glamorous, more beautiful and elegant and graceful, sharing a life with a mystery woman of complete stature and poise, languishing in a sepia-toned daydream of romance. Someone gentle and kind and delicate, but dark and alluring and intense, too, when she wanted to be. It was an easy, comfortable way to exist as a sort of shadow of yourself.
The other way I’ve always really wanted to hide has been based on my appearance. I have consistently found myself particularly drawn to an effortless sort of femininity I felt I was miles away from.
Most girls at my school seemed to bare an inherent natural grace, a porcelain-like greek statue beauty. Like Botticelli paintings, just looking some of at them sent me into a self-conscious spiral of pulse-racing and stuttered words.
I hated how I looked so very much at school. I would look at myself in the mirror, my disproportionate adolescent features, my widening but not yet complete hips, my premature growth spurt, and my skin was constantly flushed from embarrassment and hatred for my visibility.
I’d look at the everyone else around me, so pretty and seemingly secure, and I’d want to be swallowed.
I felt like that scene in Beauty and the Beast, when the beast is attempting to woo Belle, despite his big paws too clumsy to lift a delicate silver soup spoon, and his coarse temperament being too strong to correctly recite an extract from Romeo and Juliet.
Too visible, ungainly, taking up space.
And, though I felt really ugly, and ungraceful, I never felt feel boyish as such, or masculine, and that’s what I thought you had to be to fall in love with the kinds of girls I fell for. After all, I did have long hair, I painted my nails sometimes, I even wore dresses…surely that means I’m not, you know, a lesbian. I wasn’t one of those tomboy girls, and I didn’t particularly want to be one of those either. I didn’t know who I could be, I didn’t know there was a visible existence for me. I just felt hopeless at the thought of being liked anyone. I didn’t want to be seen, and I didn’t see any fit for what I would become.
As some of my friends had boyfriends by then, I became impatient, frustrated and sad in my isolation. I worked in a high-end gift shop at the weekends, wrapping pens and trinkets and books in iridescent gift-wrap and silk ribbons. Fantasy daydreams weren’t enough any more. Getting sadder and more aloof, I fixated no longer on stories of blissful romance, instead escaping into stories of horror, fear, and inevitable disappearance of women’s lives. I felt closer to a ghost than a person with feelings and wants, invisible to the turning world. At the time, I couldn’t see myself anywhere but lost. I wanted to be the disappearing girl.
You would think in 8 years this wouldn’t really matter much now. I’m 24 now, I’ve been out of the proverbial closest for 6 years. And yet, I think back on it all and I realise now how interconnected my interests today still are to those pivotal, missing years of insecure invisibility. It’s so strange though, sometimes I still feel like I’m that girl again. I’ll be at work, someone will ask me if I have a boyfriend, if I fancy this guy. And that momentary lurch of panic, my head scrambling to think of a lie, I find myself back in that stuttering fear, feeling ashamed and awkward and uncomfortable again, wanting to hide and not be faced by that excruciating moment of explanation. I hate having my photograph taken. Even now, I hesitate writing this because I never write about this sort of thing or articulate it with out an anxious apprehension that I will be viewed in a specific way because of this story.
I thought Hangsaman would end with our protagonist being killed in the woods.
Instead, she remembers the significance of her relationships, of a drunk girl who needs her back, and is guided back along to the college safely. By showing myself, I hope I can lend the same help, bring someone back from the sea of invisibility.