Timothy
Glenn McGraw
—
Absence as
Presence

Chase it with a water down copy, burn it to memory
with any other name but my own?

—

No. This I cannot pursue.

Tim belongs to an assumed past, like so many forgeries aspiring to go undetected. Even if he were able to capture your likeness, the depth of your character would elude him.

Could I chase
my own shadow?

remarkable, when we reflect upon his face, everything becomes a blank expression, age lines dissolve, scars diminish, he is no different as the light that casts his shadow. Like regret, it all bleeds through. How? he asked himself. How did they discover me?

Possessing a name eclipsed by someone else proved to be a temporary diversion.

Through a peephole surrogate, the security camera granted Tim remote access. He watched as his uninvited visitor enter the frame with a letter clenched between her fingertips. His location announced by habitual markings on an envelope. He imagined himself on the other side of the door, pressing his back firmly against it. Someday she will stop and leave me as most do.

Coming home, he’s confronted by her lingering scent - cheap tobacco masked by crushed lavender. It was a warning. Soon there will be more attempts to reveal himself.

Face planted in the artificial turf. Red lights flash against the plastered facade. Wrists tightly bound. but only by his persistence to recede into obscurity. He broods on his most recent ex.

'all of them have managed to escape your attention,' she whispers and reminds him that the past is larger than he had once depicted. Familiar as his name may suggest, Tim in all his deceptive appearances is by no means a present figure. He has already become something removed from me and that distance grows.

As if I could ever exchange words and admit that I had always been the source. She was seventeen, a few months separate from myself. As he mouthed the words, nothing sprung from his lips, someone had already taken his place - lending a voice to the silence.

There was no inherent discrimination or monstrous distortion to be found, he was a man invisible by his own neglect.

It followed him, going after his best pursuits to shape a profile he would stagger to recognize. What footing he had left depended solely on another’s approval. His darkest specter through prying eyes, were those closest to him. He would run from the imagined dangers he had once perpetuated - scanning for headlights and headlines prompted by cues just offscreen.

Trying to catch up felt more like he was falling behind. His sense of timing prolonged by delays of waiting in the dark.

Backlit by a setting sun, he approached the parked car. They’ll come back, he conceded.

Within minutes, insides were scattered along the paved asphalt into a noctural nightmare of pale white and blood red. What was easy to find during the day became lost to the night. Everything was within reach. Frequent visits became causal annoyances. The usual, rang out as a high pitch, no longer discernible and too deafening to appreciate.