Vanishing

On my wedding day, everything pointed to it being the happiest day of my life, one with a future that held endless promise. Green rakija was served, and guests danced as if in a wild, uncontrollable swirl. The band played "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash, though I didn’t recognize it as a sign at the time. The groom was late and passed me off to his younger brother to walk with me. People whispered about how sweet he was but that he seemed a little young for me, which I found more funny than worrying. The groom forgot to bring the traditional items for the church ceremony: the white cloth, candles, and, of course, the money. He’d promised to handle it, as he would countless times afterward. That spring day turned into a storm. Our best man’s pants split open at the back, and we had to wait for him as well. We stopped to take photos at a forbidden holy site, and nothing—none of these things—could disturb the happiness that came from believing I’d found the man with whom I’d share boundless love, despite my former objections to marriage.

What no one knew, not even I, was that this wasn’t a wedding—it was a funeral. My signature on that marriage certificate was not a consent to marriage but a death sentence carried out on the spot. On my wedding day- I died.

Around that time, I realized that my wedding ring was missing. I was devastated. My ring had been my talisman, a reminder during hard times that something greater existed—my home. “How could it have disappeared? It couldn’t have simply slipped off; it was crafted precisely for my finger.” After a long, futile search, I accepted that the mystery would remain unsolved. Since my husband had no intention of wearing his ring either, we became a couple without rings.

It started with him taking control of all my income. I was the one with a steady job, while he was always too “tired from work”, though he never clearly explained what this “work” entailed. After years, I asked the same question for the millionth time, but this time, I found the right words, and, in a crafty way like women can, asked him what he was doing all day. He answered that he spent all day driving around town from one person to another in the car I had paid for, maintained, and fueled. From the beginning, always with the excuse that I didn’t know how to manage money, he had absorbed my salary, my credit cards, and eventually, he and his mommy started taking me to banks to open loans, more and more each year. True, I was an artist, and, when in love, I trusted my man implicitly and wouldn’t have it any other way.

After a while, I noticed something strange. My palms began to fade, becoming translucent. And when he started forging my signature, I noticed that, the more he used it without my knowledge, the more my personal signature on letters, my poetry, various forms—even our marriage certificate—began to fade. Once he fully assumed it, my signature disappeared completely.

"How is this possible?" with an unsettling feeling, feeling a bit panicked, I wondered to myself. “Why is this happening?”

After my signature vanished, so did my intimate life over time. He and his mommy pressured me constantly to have a child, so insistently that I began wondering—who even wanted this child? I remembered my love for the idea of being a mom, but now it seemed to have nothing to do with me. At times, he would look at his watch as if consulting an appointment book, and, without looking at me, would ask dispassionately, "Shall we?" At first, I agreed, only for him to collapse on the bed and wait for me to “do my job.” He would close his eyes, silent, and mute the sounds around him.

Then, something strange began to happen again. After each encounter, I would go to the bathroom and see in the mirror that I was disappearing—bit by bit. My face, my body, slowly fading away. A chill ran through my hollow spine as if I were falling into nothingness. “No, no, no, please! Stop! Come back. I know I don’t deserve to exist, that he’s better than me and deserves a better woman, but if I disappear, he’ll stop loving me! Please, come back!” I would silently scream into the mirror, gripping the sink as if I could crush it, tears streaming down my face. In the meantime, I’d had two miscarriages that I knew of—and who knows how many more. No one realized the truth at the time: ghosts cannot give birth.

The vow “for better or worse” is a horribly misleading phrase. It kept many of us in the wrong place for far too long. “For better and against worse” would be much more practical because it would make it clearer, and much sooner we could observe that our partner is the very evil we should be fighting against. The original phrase makes us believe there’s something outside our marriage wrecking our “sacred union,” something we must always fix and work on, without realizing that we’re the only ones working on it.

Taking all my income, he led me to social isolation. He would leave the house at eight in the morning and return at eight in the evening. During those hours, I would read, write, watch movies... If I ever wanted to meet with someone, I’d give up quickly, as I had no money. Every evening at eight, he’d bring me only a pack of cigarettes from my own money—not when I ran out, but when he decided to come home.

The isolation was complete. I had disappeared from all my photos. Everything was the same. Everyone else was there. Only I was missing from the pictures.

“Why are you doing this to me, God? Why me? What have I done to deserve this?” I often repeated it desperately, slowly slipping into paranoia.

You probably think I sound stupid or naïve, but you don’t need to be stupid to be deceived—all you need is a big heart.

Of course, disagreements and arguments began at some point, but I was always the one delivering a monologue. For a while, I tried talking calmly over coffee, later appealing to reason. I even reached the point of yelling, grinding my teeth—something unlike me at all—but all attempts were doomed from the start.

Having cut me off from everyone except my mother, who would sometimes come over and barely recognized me, I spoke less and less. And in my efforts to talk to him, he neither listened nor responded. After my palms faded, my signature, my hands, and finally my entire body disappeared—I lost my voice as well. “This feeling reminds me of the nightmares I’d had as a child, when in my dreams I would call out to my mother from my crib, a monster looming above me. No matter how hard I struggled and strained, not a single sound would come out. "Have I had a stroke and lost my ability to speak?" I wondered as my heart began racing again, and oxygen couldn’t reach my brain. Now, looking back, maybe I can call that experience a kind of stroke."

Only my shadow remained, circling around. The shadow of a person.

I became a ghost. I completely disappeared during those ten years of hell—a place where, one might say, I seemed to enjoy staying. My personal scent faded. This clearly had something to do with my need to please the “hardworking” man in my life by cooking for him. But no matter what I made, it remained untouched, as every day he would bring food from his mommy. So, I stopped cooking and lost my scent. Baths, perfumes, an entire arsenal of cosmetics—my skin no longer absorbed anything. I used to feel nauseated by strong scents; now I felt sick realizing I no longer had any scent of my own.

When he, as always, managed to convince me to work four jobs by saying we didn’t have enough money because I was “sitting idle”—despite my full-time job—I opened a children’s school, started writing for a magazine, and even opened a jazz bar. I was successful at everything, though I was only a shadow. But then my things started disappearing from the house, one by one. First, small trinkets dear to my heart, then my entire library, and finally, everything else: my coffee cup, my shoes. It felt as though I were losing my mind.

By then, lying in a marital bed next to no one, with my "empty" pillow, he would be chatting with other women, sending and receiving pictures, meeting them at places where I had introduced him to people who would now always ask where I was, as they hadn’t seen me in ages. And so, I lost my last trace of humanity—my shadow. “If I’ve lost my shadow, does that mean I no longer exist? But how can it be that I’m still here? Does anyone even notice me?” I hoped for a miracle.

One night, I had a dream. As a ghost, it was hard to tell a dream from reality, but this time it was clear. In a vast white space, on school chairs facing one another, sat my 14-year-old self and I, the ghost. Once a smiling, cheeky chatterbox, eyes wide and head tilted forward, eager to learn everything, she now looked dreadful. A little punk girl with greasy, messy long hair, combat boots, a wide skirt, an oversized hoodie with a few safety pins, but her face was gray, exhausted, streaked with tear-stained black makeup. She looked terrified and said nothing. Her eyes told me everything. I was guilty. I had allowed others to destroy that girl within me, to keep her forever frightened, sad, and feeling worthless. I apologized repeatedly, explaining, but she neither stopped crying, nor spoke, nor could she make herself stand, even when I promised I’d never treat her that way again, that I’d always care for and love her. And then it became clear: for the ghost to live, I had to die on that wedding-funeral day. For the ghost to die and the beautiful girl to live, I would have to die myself.

Slowly, I awoke, rose quietly, no longer myself, put on my house slippers; and like a dead woman, I stepped out into the night in my nightgown. If I’d had even an atom of strength, emotion, or presence left in me, I might have felt love, hatred, pain, sorrow—thousands of emotions in that one single moment as I walked through the door.

And then, one small spark from my dead body, but my living soul, appeared when, in the beautiful and powerful moonlight, I saw a faint outline of my shadow before me. I knew then that everything would be all right. Dead, I passed through the city, its empty streets, and arrived at my parents’ house.

For years, I lay as a ghost, but the more I spoke to my girl, the more visible I became. She reminded me of my promise to care for her, and at last, I stood up, fully visible, with a deep voice and the scent of white clover, as I like to say. I was alive. To my senses, everything felt like experiencing it for the first time. The cold snowball in my palms, seeing myself in the mirror for the first time as I truly was—a beautiful and strong woman. My powerful voice carried through song to the next block, and I often played with the Sun, spinning my shadow in a dance.

I saw my little girl a few more times. Each time, she was older and more beautiful. The last time we met, she was again sitting in a school chair across from me, my age now, and she looked just like me—a modest lady with her hands and legs crossed, in a lovely baby-pink, fairy-like dress, smiling like Mona Lisa.

He soon changed friends, married my waitress-student, and left the city. No one knows where he lives or what he does... They ask me, "Who was your husband?" / “We don’t know him.” / “What did he do for a living?” / “It’s a small town; how does no one know him?”

I know. One night, while sorting through my photos, something I had forgotten to do for years, I laughed like a child when I saw that my image had returned to every picture. But my smile didn’t fade when I noticed one last strange thing. He was no longer in any of the pictures. Now he had become the ghost. The ghost of the past.

There is one great difference between him and me. I can choose to be either a ghost or a living being. He has no choice.