No One Captured Her
This one started with my new obsession with the line “It is subjects, not objects, who become irresistible.”
At first, she was just being petty after too many glasses of solo whiskey.
It was a breakup, a small act of erasure, as she deleted every photo of herself online. The filtered smiles, the group shots where she leaned into someone else’s shadow, even the one he took of her at the beach, sunlight spilling like gold across her bare shoulders.
Gone. She danced with herself in the kitchen and told herself it was catharsis. A purge.
The first time someone noticed was at a friend’s birthday, when the pictures were posted, and she wasn’t there.
Not blurred. Not cropped. Just…absent.
An empty chair between two laughing faces, a wine glass raised by no one.
“Maybe it’s a glitch,” someone said.
She smiled to herself and didn’t correct them.
Then it kept happening.
Cameras failed to find her, and storefront windows reflected everything but her shape.
Standing in front of the mirror in her bedroom, she saw only the brightly painted wall behind her, a badly composed image of nothing.
The more she disappeared, the more invincible she felt.
There was something intoxicating about it, the slow removal of herself from the visible world. No rush to document, to be tagged, to prove she existed. The urge to perform not just for others but for herself had been a hunger, a leash. Now, it was severed.
At night, she scrolled through her feeds, watching her absence spread like a secret disease.
People she once knew would post photos captioned, miss you, wish you were here…but none could recall what her face looked like anymore. Cryptic stories reaching out to her through the nothingness gripped her heart momentarily, then immediately vanished.
A voice message pinged in the darkness of midnight from someone who once saw her more clearly than anyone had, “Baby… I keep dreaming about a girl who sounds like you.”
She smiled, then added a tiny pink heart emoji to the thread.
The notification would never be received.
There was a calming hum of unseen things. When the world stopped looking back, other frequencies made themselves known…whispers in the static, the warmth of a hug floating in the air, pixels rearranging themselves into unfamiliar shapes around her like the soft flutter of a butterfly wing.
She started leaving small offerings for the emptiness: bits of silver jewelry, strands of her hair, handwritten notes that said thank you for forgetting me.
The city began to bend around her absence.
Automatic doors didn’t open, streetlights flickered, and facial recognition cameras skipped over her as if she were fog.
It was freedom, pure and incorporeal.
Her body moved differently now; not as prey, not as spectacle, but as force. When men stared through her on the street, their eyes twitched, pupils dilating as though they’d glimpsed a god they weren’t allowed to name.
In her wake, screens glitched, photos taken near her blurred into static, influencers complained that their lighting had gone strange. A fashion blogger lost a thousand followers after posting an empty frame where a girl she photographed in a tight black dress should’ve been.
They didn’t know it, but she was still there…dancing in the code, filling the space between the pixels with her joy.
Watching.
Sometimes, she’d reach out, testing the boundaries.
A reflection would stutter.
A phone would ring at midnight and play a single note of her laughter.
A man who’d once hurt her would wake with the sensation of someone whispering her name against his throat, the discomfort of two fingers pressing slowly into his airflow.
There was power in not being seen.
It was the opposite of invisibility; it was sovereignty.
She no longer needed to exist for anyone’s consumption.
She no longer needed proof that she was enough.
They would try to remember her name and find only static.
Scrolling through old photos, they’d see nothing but space…and somewhere, between the light and the data, she would smile.
The girl who stopped being photographed hadn’t vanished; she had ascended.
Not into fame, but into myth.
No trace but the trembling of those who once tried to capture her.