"INTO THIN AIR"

(Will someone notice?)

It was a simple, quiet sunset. The sun, on its slow descent into slumber, cast golden light across the weary streets of Manila. Everything it touched seemed softer, slower.I looked around and saw people strewn about sidewalks and benches, letting the stillness of dusk settle into their bones. They looked like they were preparing themselves, gathering fragments of strength for the week ahead.

Despite the distant thrum of construction and the occasional sounds of passing cars, the atmosphere held a strange kind of serenity—fragile, but present. These small, imperfect moments unraveled the stiff, cold image I had formed of Manila. For a fleeting second, the city became something else entirely warmer, more intimate.

And I wondered: Was this simply the spell of the weekend? Or had I judged this place too harshly, refusing to let it speak for itself?

Still, I could feel its calmness, curling around me like a soft wind. As I stepped carefully along the uneven pavement, unsure of where the path would take me, I drifted inward, back into thought.

This place, this moment became a sanctuary. A quiet corner of the world where time slowed just enough to let me breathe. I inhaled. I exhaled. I tilted my head to the sky, let my eyelids fall halfway, and in that stillness, a thought broke the silence:

“What if I just vanished?”

Not death. No. Not grief, not tragedy. A quiet undoing. One blink and I am gone—as if I had slipped into thin air, reappearing in a place where no one knows my name, where my story begins again with clean pages. The idea visits me sometimes, always uninvited, yet never unwelcome.

I imagine strange possibilities: a bus tumbling into the abyss of uncertainty, me crawling out with no memory, reborn. Or waking in a place that hums with peace and detachment, where I know no one and no one knows me and there is no road back. Sometimes, it’s the reverse. Everyone wakes up remembering everything but me. I remain unchanged, invisible in the eyes of people I used to call my name.

I don’t know why these thoughts linger. But they do. And they make me wonder.

Tracing the roots of this longing, I realized something painful: I have never truly belonged. I was never the first thought in anyone’s mind. Never the one they searched for in a crowd. I was the afterthought, the echo. The person they noticed only when I clapped first but forgot when I didn’t clap at all.

I remember family gatherings. I was there, yes but often, I saw myself from a distance, as though through the eyes of a third person. I felt like a ghost in my own skin. Not quite excluded, not quite embraced. I would shrink myself, quiet my footsteps, hush my breathing until silence became a habit, a form of comfort.

As the years passed, I watched how people mourned the absence of their golden ones, their protagonists. “It wasn’t the same without you,” they’d say. “You were missed.” And I’d wonder: Would they say the same of me? Or would the world move on without so much as a pause?

Eventually, I came to understand: this was my default setting. The spare tire. The substitute. The one whose absence leaves no void.

And so I became indifferent. Detached. Jaded. Not just tired of people but tired of being myself. Tired of this identity I had to carry like a burden. I spent my life pleasing others, contorting myself into palatable shapes. And now, I’ve swung too far in the other direction. I don’t care anymore. Perhaps the purest freedom lies in vanishing.

I shared this thought once, with a close friend over coffee. He listened quietly, then tried gently, logically—to untangle the threads of my sadness. He listed the things I was good at, reminded me of what I was worth. Normally, I would have dismissed his words, scoffed at them, doubted every syllable. But that day, I let them in. I let them settle, unchallenged.

Maybe he was right.

And maybe, one day, I’ll see it too. 💨

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