I used to recognize myself
in the way others reached for me.

Now it feels like they’re reaching
for someone slightly off
from where I actually am.

Like a name called across a room
and answered by someone else’s echo.

There are still traces of her —
the version they gather around —
as if she is consistent,
as if she is still here.

They speak her into the space
like a shared agreement
I don't remember signing.

And I stand just outside it
quietly aware
that I am no longer her.

Not dramatically.
Not visibly.

Just… elsewhere.

There are moments when they assemble her again —
without noticing.
The tone, the assumptions,
the old ease of access.

When they first see me, I can see on their face a celebration
of someone I used to be.

A small parade of familiarity.
A gathering of gestures
that once fit me cleanly.

And I feel something strange in it —
not jealousy, not resentment —
but distance so precise it becomes eerie.

Because I can see her there.

I can see how well she still works
in their memory of me.

And I can also see
that she doesn’t exist in me anymore.

Not in the way they’re speaking her.

It isn’t that I’ve become someone else
in a clean, legible way.

It’s more like the internal continuity broke
and no one received the update.

So I keep moving through it
as a kind of translation error
between versions of the same person.

There are conversations where I can almost step back in —
just enough alignment
to pass as her again.

But it never fully holds.

There’s always a moment
where I feel the seam.

Like something is being performed
that no longer has a living source.

And I think about Peter in Fringe —
not because he’s elsewhere exactly,
but because he keeps appearing
in a reality that no longer has him as a reference point.

He tries to be seen as real
inside a system that can only interpret him
as impossibility.

And so even his presence
becomes distortion.

That’s what it feels like sometimes —
not absence, not exile,
but misrecognition so complete
it starts to resemble invisibility.

I can reach them.
I can speak.
I can stand in the same rooms.

But the version they’re responding to
is slightly out of phase with me now.

And no one seems to notice
that I’m no longer fully inside it.

Or maybe they do —
and continuity is more comfortable
than correction.

Some days I think I’m becoming clearer.

Other days I think I’m just learning
how little of me
is required to maintain the illusion
that nothing has changed.