Carolyn, or, How to Disappear Completely

I.

The thing that frightened Carolyn most about moving home was the possibility of running into people she used to know, and for the first several months after she returned she lived in an almost constant state of nervousness over just such an encounter.

Carolyn had changed in the ten years since leaving town, to the point where the old Carolyn – the person she once was – had more or less ceased to exist; Carolyn was sure the people she used to know had also changed, and that she would not recognize them as the people she had once known, because those people had also ceased to exist.

But the fact that the people Carolyn used to know no longer existed was the crux of the problem, because Carolyn suspected that the people she used to know were not aware of this change: they would demand that Carolyn treat them as if they were the same person they had always been, despite the fact that they had become someone else entirely.

Of course, there were some people who would feel the same way Carolyn did, but this, too, was disconcerting to Carolyn; part of Carolyn’s fear of running into the people she used to know was the possibility of causing psychic pain to those who had long ago relegated the old Carolyn to a forgotten corner of their consciousness, and who would not want to be reminded of this fact by the new Carolyn, with whom they had very little in common.

But more frightening to Carolyn than causing psychic pain to those who had given up on Carolyn’s existence was the thought of running into those people who had not given up, who had, in fact, been waiting for Carolyn to return to the city for years now.

Such a person might have a great deal at stake in the idea that Carolyn was still Carolyn, regardless of Carolyn’s belief that she herself had become a completely different Carolyn entirely, and Carolyn could imagine the effect of such interactions, day after day, to the point where all of the progress Carolyn had made towards becoming a new and more evolved Carolyn would be destroyed by the unceasing demands that she return to being the Carolyn from before, the Carolyn who no longer existed.

So Carolyn developed a plan: she would keep a watchful eye out for the people she used to know, especially those awaiting the return of Carolyn, so that if she were to run into such a person she could find some means of escape from the situation before the person waiting for Carolyn could recognize her.

II.

There was one gap in Carolyn’s plan: she assumed that the people who were waiting for Carolyn would be easily identifiable, when in fact the people who were waiting for Carolyn might have undergone great changes since Carolyn last saw them – similar to the changes Carolyn herself had undergone – and therefore might be unrecognizable to Carolyn as the people they once were.

Once Carolyn realized that the people who were waiting for Carolyn might no longer resemble their former selves, the possibility of running into such people only increased, to the point where anyone in the city, no matter how unfamiliar, might be waiting for Carolyn without her knowing it, and Carolyn’s nervousness, which had only just begun to subside, returned twofold.

It occurred to Carolyn that the people who had changed the most from their former selves might also be the ones who most eagerly awaited the return of the old Carolyn, an idea that frightened Carolyn more than any other: that someone might have spent the ten years of Carolyn’s absence fixating on the old Carolyn as an emblem of their past, a sort of Carolyn-shaped substitute for lost things.

Carolyn did not know what she would do, exactly, to avoid such a person, so she developed a much different plan: she would become as little like the old Carolyn as possible, dress differently, down to socks and the accessories, and start purposefully doing things that she felt Carolyn would not normally do, such as eating alone, going to the cinema in the daytime, and riding in taxicabs.

By cultivating distinctly non-Carolyn habits, Carolyn had a twofold hope: firstly, that she would avoid the parts of the city that a person seeking Carolyn would habitually frequent, and secondly, in the unlikely event that she ran into someone seeking Carolyn in a non-Carolyn part of town, that her behavior and appearance would have grown so far removed from what was normally considered Carolyn-esque that she would be unrecognizable to the people who were waiting for Carolyn to return.

In this way the new Carolyn would diverge so far from the old Carolyn that Carolyn would no longer have to worry about being mistaken for a Carolyn that didn’t exist, and could go on being Carolyn without fear.

III.

As the months went on, Carolyn found that she genuinely enjoyed engaging in non-Carolyn habits; perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised her, considering that it was a need to try new things and new experiences that had forced Carolyn to grow and change in the first place, to the point where the old Carolyn no longer existed.

The only thing that worried Carolyn from time to time was the ratio of Carolyn-like behavior to un-Carolyn-like behavior, and whether it might be possible to cultivate so many non-Carolyn habits that Carolyn would cease to be Carolyn at all, and would become unrecognizable to herself; the more she thought about this possibility the more Carolyn began to become nervous, to the point where Carolyn’s nervousness over whether she was still Carolyn in any meaningful sense of the term was equal to – if not greater than – her earlier fears.

The only way Carolyn had of soothing this fear was to assure herself that no behavior could be truly un-Carolyn if Carolyn herself engaged in it, and that by taking on more and more non-Carolyn habits Carolyn was only expanding the definition of Carolyn; she was relieved to discover that the idea of Carolyn was large enough to encompass whatever Carolyn wanted to become.

IV.

Little did Carolyn know that she was fast approaching a larger and more complex problem: the idea of Carolyn was expanding at such a rapid rate that it was quickly becoming difficult for Carolyn do anything un-Carolyn, and this made it easier and easier for the people who were waiting for Carolyn to recognize her as Carolyn, no matter how had she tried to convince them otherwise.

That was the great flaw in all her plans: in trying to be as non-Carolyn as possible, she assumed the people who were waiting for Carolyn were expecting a particular kind of Carolyn, that is to say, the same Carolyn they had always known, the old Carolyn, the Carolyn who no longer existed.

What if, in fact, the opposite was true, and the people who were waiting for Carolyn had already begun to imagine a Carolyn who was quite different from the Carolyn they had once known, a Carolyn that changed with the passing of time; such a Carolyn might be comforting, insofar as it would reassure the people who were waiting for Carolyn that no matter how much Carolyn changed she would still be Carolyn.

What if the idea of Carolyn – an ever-changing Carolyn, forever evolving, but keeping at the core a sort of super-Carolyn, recognizable to the people who had once known her – was growing at such a rapid rate that there was no way Carolyn herself could ever hope to keep up?

The people who were waiting for Carolyn were forever dreaming of things Carolyn might be doing as they waited for her to arrive, so that no matter what non-Carolyn behaviors Carolyn tried to employ, in the end all Carolyn was doing was fulfilling their expectations of her, broadening the idea of Carolyn until it seemed to encompass an entire world of possibilities.

Carolyn tried the most un-Carolyn behaviors and non-Carolyn habits imaginable; she went to parts of the city where no one had ever heard of Carolyn before and gave a non-Carolyn name, just to be safe; she committed crimes for which no one would ever dream Carolyn was responsible; she even began to speak of Carolyn in the third person, as if by creating the character of Carolyn she could at last be free to be Carolyn again.

But it was all no use; each attempt to avoid being Carolyn folded effortlessly into the idea of Carolyn, and the idea of Carolyn grew so large that there was no way that Carolyn could escape.

In the end Carolyn was swallowed by Carolyn, and disappeared completely.

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