Once, there was a boy who grew up in an average family and lived in an average house. He was an average boy with average grades and average looks. Mediocrity did not settle well into his bones and a seed of unhappiness was planted deep inside his body (perhaps between the pancreas and the duodenum). This little packet of vitriol grew new limbs each day and it birthed a twisted idea that nestled snugly into the moist folds of his young, impressionable mind.

He had decided he wanted to disappear.

After all, when one was always fading into the background, the next reasonable step was to be the background. This, he thought, would be his ticket out of old, gray, normality, launching him into the annals of history. He would be the first to disappear. Or so he thought.

The plan he had arranged for himself was simple: Ignore people and people will ignore you. Don’t eat heavy foods. Water, only. Mind-drift often. But the most important thing was believing that he didn’t exist.

After a while, his parents got used to his silent ways. They got used to his constant ghosting around. They saw him bringing food up to his room, not knowing that he placed them in plastic bags and threw them away every night.

“Just a phase,” they said. “Just a phase.”

People’s gazes started to slide off him, like water on Hyacinth leaves. They wouldn’t stick. It was a powerful feeling.

Everyday he would stay in his room and repeat to himself, “I do not exist.” Sometimes he would look in the mirror and imagine that there was no reflection. Sometimes, it worked.

He was thin now, in a way that was different from those anorexic models pasted on magazines. No, he was thin in a way that was like having more and more layers skinned off. Like an onion. Yes, that was more or less right. He was like an onion, and the layers were being peeled off, one fleshy layer a day.

In fact, he thought, as he raised a hand against the lamp on his ceiling, he could see through the skin, past the bones and to the glow-in-the-dark stars he had stuck on the ceiling a few years ago. Porous. That was what was happening to him. He was becoming light porous.

It was working. The jubilant thought spiked in his mind.

One day, he realised he could walk through walls. By then, he had as much shadow as the lace curtain that hung in the living room. It would billow out like earth-clouds when the wind visited and he took great comfort hiding in the dusty, spider-traversed womb feeling wonderfully invisible.

I do not exist, he thought smugly. I do not exist.

The fear first struck when it was too late. By then, he could feel the disturbing movement of his molecules being rattled by particles in the air. When the previously welcomed, previously friendly wind came, he could feel atoms violently torn off, whirling away, lost forever. The detachment was painless. With each passing minute, less and less of him was there. He was like a handful of sand placed in front of a fan.

When he saw his fingers disappear, he thought, with a mouse-fluttering heart, I do not exist. I do not exist anymore.

He tried to grab back those lost particles. Tried to grab back the epithelial cells, the muscular tissue, the bone marrow as one by one they were whisked away.

This was when he thought, ‘I am dying. I am not here anymore. I do no—‘

And then, he blinked out of the world.

In the next room, his mother smiled, sat his father down and told him she was two weeks pregnant.