disappear
ˌdisəˈpir/
verb.
cease to be visible.

I never understood it. I was never the person who was able to drop people on a moment’s notice, to quickly forget that someone meant something to me. I was never able to completely erase a person from my mind. But, what becomes so hard to understand is sometimes the people you value and adore, don’t have anything to give you at all. Sometimes the people you believe that you want most in the world, or the people you believe could have meant something special to you, just vanish. There is no romance in being forgotten or left behind, there is only the realization that no matter how hard you could have tried, there was nothing else to be done.

Google “The Great Disappearing Act” and you will be greeted with long lists of famous and infamous people who have vanished without a trace from Amelia Earhart who was never found, to Agatha Christie who was found two weeks after her disappearance, 250 miles from her home, registered under a different name (her husband was having an affair). And it sounds all too familiar doesn’t it? Maybe the people disappearing from our lives don't skip town and find different aliases, but it sure feels like it at times. Sometimes, when we crave closure, when we just want a single explanation, just one sentence to tell us what went wrong, to close the door, we can’t get it. We have no power over how little or how much someone can give us. And sometimes people run from us, other times we do the running.

Unlike 10, 20, 50 years ago, we can completely disappear from someone’s life without a single word. We don’t have to make explanations in phone calls or speak in person; we “ghost” each other because behind the confines of a computer screen it becomes much too easy to forget that there is another human being with feelings on the other end. But, I also know that a lot of people in my generation rely on ways of communication that don’t even require eye contact or the addressing of feelings. We can ignore a text message or a Snapchat just as easily as we can send one.

I would love to tell everyone to stop doing this. To be brutally honest when it counts, to recognize that you may hurt someone in the process of being honest. In telling someone you may never want to talk to them again, it may be difficult but at least we would know. At least if everyone was honest with their feelings, you wouldn’t have to wonder where someone went or if they truly cared.

But, maybe the problem isn’t that we don’t want someone in our lives, maybe it’s that we have gotten so used to walking away when things get difficult that we don’t know another way anymore. We aren’t there for people because we don’t always have to be and we forget because we don’t care enough to remember. And isn’t that the biggest tragedy of all? Not that we disappear from someone’s life, but that we never cared to stay in the first place.