Invisible
- Caroline Coleman
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Invisibility might just be the best thing to ever happen to us. A short story (or is it?) by Caroline Coleman.
We walked the streets unseen. Even on concrete, the paths were well worn. Our shoes made no sound, because we no longer wore heels. Bunions—and other mysterious foot woes—had precipitated a steep loss of interest in our angled footwear. We kept our heels on display in our closets, turning them into shoe museums like Imelda Marcos when she reinvented herself—for a third time—by becoming a Senator. Perhaps we kept our heels because we imagined that one day we'd wear them again. But why would we bother with the discomfort of heels, we asked ourselves in our more lucid moments, when we were invisible?
At first, we mourned the way we seemed to be fading from sight, the way heads no longer turned, the way men walked past us as if seeing through us. The mourning was quiet, drawn out, slow like blood seeping from a flesh wound. We were mostly in denial.
Mostly.
Then it struck us that the only ones leering at us were toothless and hairless—sometimes even mindless. We hadn't noticed these leerers before. They must have been there all along. Now they were thrust into the foreground, plucked from obscurity. We didn't like this audience. We shuddered and made lemon-puckered mouths.
Observing ourselves carefully in the mirror when alone, we couldn't understand why no one saw us anymore. We secretly believed we looked the same. We could only see the signs of decrepitude in our friends. We prided ourselves on beating Father Time.
Our younger friends told us we looked amazing.
Wow, you have great genes, they'd say. What’s your secret?
You must keep a portrait in the attic.
We'd tut tut and duck our heads and demur appreciatively. A literary compliment! The best kind! It must be true if they went to the bother of being clever about it! Never mind that we heard them say this to all their older friends. At least they hadn't said we looked like our daughters’ sisters.
With time, we grew greedy for even the tired sister line. We were looking for compliments, any compliments, because some of our so-called friends, savvier with social media skills, were publicly displaying pictures of us that shattered our delusions of youthfulness. Some of these cough-cough friends face-apped themselves so that they appeared with smooth skin in the foreground whilst we hovered in the background looking like we had hippo skin, full of sags.
Eventually we started longing for the stares of even the senile old men. We admitted we were addicts. We needed our male gaze fixes. But the looks we managed to procure were lupine. We wondered why we’d wanted that from the snowier-toothed men in the first place. What had we imagined that those grins and stares and leers would do for us? What had it done for us? Perhaps it had been hollow, a ghost, something so ephemeral it never existed.
This concept stopped us in our tracks. Had we been dressing and walking and squeezing our tender toes into too-narrow cylinders for no reason? To feed off glances had been a delusion.
We accepted our fates. As we began to walk the streets unseen, something shifted in us like when our water broke, just before the contractions grew exponentially faster. We took deep breaths. We felt the strange unaccustomed power—power!—of walking unseen. We could do anything! We could be anyone! We were uninhibited as long as we decided not to care that no one else noticed.
We'd trucked in that particular cliché all our lives—stop caring what anyone thinks. Now we were forced to live it. We didn't like it, and yet we did. It felt uncomfortable like new shoes—well, like the new shoes we used to buy. Now we wore New Balance sneakers even with ball gowns and found we had a delightful spring to our steps. We caught younger women glancing at our comfy footwear with a mixture of contempt and abject longing. Some of the young women emulated us, pairing high tops or fashion kicks with their black tie outfits, and calling it hip.
We found big fat ugly sneakers were best. We didn't discuss it with each other, limiting ourselves to little orthotic-jokes followed by a quick glance to see if the truth behind our humor landed. We knew some weren't ready to say out loud what we were forced to admit in our hearts. Instead, we supported each other in our unfashionable footwear through emulation, the finest form of flattery.
We found ourselves dressing differently, too, favoring rhythm, line and style. We gave away our tighter outfits. Our shapes had changed. Our stomachs now arched out as though we had more babies in there. The old clothes no longer fit. There'd be no closeted museum for our spaghetti-strapped form-clingers, no forlorn hope of squeezing ourselves back inside tube tops like the ugly stepsisters tried to do with Cinderella’s glass slippers—and look how that turned out. No, no, we knew utter defeat when we stared it in its beady eye. We were only in denial about less obvious things. We gave the formerly sexy clothes away with goodwill in our hearts. We wanted in our closets only clothes that made us feel good.
And feel good we did. Invisible meant freedom. We were free of the male gaze and of the desire to attract the male gaze—our two former twinned enemies. Our chains were gone. We walked where we wanted when we wanted and our new balance took us there.
We found peace in the unforced rhythms of grace. Deep called to deep. We felt a joy in our bones and in our hearts. Freed from the fear of mortality, we began to move in step with something immortal, something that felt a lot like love.
Love must have been there all along, we marveled. We were shocked and humbled that we hadn't seen it. Like all the best things, it had been invisible. We’d been too busy gazing in the wrong direction.
Caroline Coleman is the author of the picture book IF I WERE A TIGER (Penguin Random House 2022) and LOVING SORRN (B&H 2005). Her short stories have appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Image Journal and Ms. Magazine.
Images:
Sneaker dress by E. Barrios
Spring shoes by eec
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“Our chains were gone”. Indeed! A most pertinent story
I still remember something our teacher wrote on the board way back when I was in 8th grade: ‘we’d worry a lot less about what people think of us if we realised that they seldom do.’ So true. Yet we somehow crave attention, wanting to feel we are special. It takes much time and experience to learn that validation can only be gained from within. As the bard once said: this above all, to thine own self be true. Well done, Caroline Coleman, for illustrating this in such vivid reality.