Eccentric Flower:201005/The Invisible Woman

Once upon a time, there was a clever woman. She had many interesting observations of the world and told interesting stories. Her ways of seeing the world were sometimes odd and obscure, and sometimes unscrambling her comments, especially when they were not made in her first language, took a bit of doing, but those who had the perseverance to do so found it rewarding.

But the world closed in on this woman slowly, the shadows deepening, her horizons narrowing, and the more she looked back at the stories and words she had left as a trail behind her, the more she worried. She was frightened of the idea that people might follow that trail and conclude that there was an enemy of the people at the far end, someone fit only to be locked up. She was even more frightened of the idea that people might find the trail dull or repetitive and refuse to follow it at all.

So she began travelling with a broom behind her, like Baba Yaga, sweeping away her footsteps as she made them. More than that, she began to double back on her own path, so she could sweep away not just her recent comings and goings, but gradually remove everything of her past.

And then one day she found herself back exactly where she started, with no trace of herself remaining. Success!

Except ... now no one knew where she was; no one knew how to find her, to hear her stories. And worse yet, now that she had erased herself, she was no longer entirely sure of who she had been in the first place, or who she was now, or why exactly she had been so determined to sweep away the past. Had she been scared? Or had she been boring? Had her past vanished because it was incriminating, or because it had not been worth saving?

She wasn't sure. And her nightmares told her no truths.

I have received Aet's permission to reveal where she currently keeps herself. This is rare, and the impulse may pass. You may go only to find that there's nothing there. There's already less there than there was a few days ago; when I checked this morning there were only two entries left; before that there were many more. By the time you read this there may well be none.

I grew tired of trying to keep other people up to date on Aet's location well before she began denying her identity. I had one too many experiences of seeing an entry or a photo that I liked and sending someone else to it only to be told there was nothing there. This has happened more times than I can remember clearly enough to count. I will say this: I think she is on at least her third Flickr account; she is on her eighth LiveJournal account that I know of. I can tell the latter more easily because I keep the old ones in my friends list - a long line of crossed-out names, a monument to despair and futility.

So, I can't guarantee that anything will be there. I can't even guarantee that these accounts will still work, once she reads this. She may have a panic attack and delete everything. This would be on my conscience except that experience tells me it's going to happen eventually anyway. The average life cycle of an Aet location now is less than four months. (I get complaints about pulling up stakes too often, and I only do it about once every four years.)

But Aet wants to know that her words still have value, and it's hard for that to happen when no one but me knows where she is. And it's an impulse I can understand, wanting desperately to know that someone is there, someone is paying attention.

Frankly, I am dubious about this experiment, because once I do this, she will expect that people will leave her comments, despite the fact that right now there is almost nothing for people to comment on. I'm worried this is just going to disappoint her more - actually, I'm sure this is going to disappoint her more, and she will conclude exactly the wrong things about it, as she generally does. Any time I've interacted with Aet in the last five years - and that's a lot, by the way - she has shown a dependable expertise for taking whatever I say and putting absolutely the worst possible interpretation on it; I can write three paragraphs telling her how much I value having her around and she will somehow spin those paragraphs to mean the exact opposite. It's very frustrating.

But I told her yesterday that if she would own up to her latest alternate identity actually being her - something she's asked me explicitly not to do for at least the past year - then I would link her. And she has, and a promise is a promise.

She is currently on LiveJournal at http://uuesti-ajutine.livejournal.com/ and on Flickr here http://www.flickr.com/photos/50074252@N08/ (except that all her photos have been deleted at present).

Maybe she'll be there a while longer. Maybe she won't.