How to Hide in Plain Sight

by Emma Noyes

I was given everything—including, but not limited to, that most elusive of gifts: the Happy Family. Undivorced parents. Siblings who can actually stand each other. Who vacation together and eat family dinner around a worn wooden table and only try to kill each other on special occasions. Who even—when the climate is right—like each other.

Because when you want ice cream or crispy, hot buttered bread, the feeling pools right atop your tongue, but when you want a place, it calls to you with every sense, sight and smell and touch and sound and, yes, even taste.

Before I learned to ignore the siren call of my memories, their taunts, daring me to jump down, down, down, into that all-too-familiar place—a hole into which at times I fell accidentally and at others I climbed willingly, allowing the rest of the soil to tumble in after me, shutting off all oxygen and blotting out the sun.

I thought I didn’t miss him. Really, I did. For three years, I pushed him from my mind. Focused on my life in New York. That’s what you do, that’s what everyone does: you grow up, you fly the coop, you leave the other birds behind.

Grief didn’t leave; if anything, it burrowed even deeper in. Took the place of the one who left.

Work. Work. All I thought about was work. I kept a strict schedule. Never turned off email or Slack notifications. Did tasks the moment they were assigned to me, truly unable to put them off. When I lay down to sleep at night, my to-do list for the next day played through my mind on an endless cycle.

It’s not that I didn’t understand the value of a vacation; it’s more that when I wasn’t working, I felt a constant gnawing at the back of my mind, as if I were forgetting something essential.

The arrangement between my parents has always been the same: Mom manages the kids, Dad manages everything else.

But…did I?

My mind picks up speed, running in endless circles. I tell myself that it’s crazy to think I’d be glad my brother is gone, then in the same breath, I circle back to the fact that I didn’t cry at his funeral. Didn’t cry. At my own brother’s funeral. Crying is the way your body tells you you’re sad. If I didn’t cry, I must not have been sad.

Then, as soon as I finish that thought, I circle back. Tell myself not to be ridiculous. But then, as soon as I finish that thought, I circle back again, even though I don’t want to.

My mind runs in circles, circles, circles. I don’t understand what’s happening.

Soon, I’m just worrying about how much I’m worrying. Then I start worrying about the fact that I’m worrying about worrying.

Then I start worrying about worrying about worrying about worrying, and suddenly my mind feels so crowded, as if my thoughts aren’t filtering out in the way most thoughts do. As if something is blocking the exit. As if, rather than in and out of my mind in an orderly line, one thought replacing another, they linger. All of them. Half sound like me; they speak with the internal voice I’ve always recognized as my own. The other half do not. The other half—they have their own voice. They’re loud. So loud. They’re a living thing. They’re hundreds of blind moths in sea...

I try every method I can think of to shut out the noise. I hum. I turn my head to the side and recite the Spanish alphabet, a list of strange and wonderful sounds we learned at school the year before. I recite the letters as loudly as I can, speaking into the fabric of my pillow. It doesn’t help. The moths keep beating their wings, keep knocking into precious artifacts in my mind, keep smashing them to pieces. I pick up both pillows and squeeze them over either side of my head. One for each ear....

Checking. A classic internal compulsion. One that I’d been performing since I was ten without ever knowing that that’s what I was doing.

I will think about it. I will think really hard about it. I will apply all of my brainpower to the task, to this one problem, the only problem that matters anymore, because that technique has always worked in the past, right? Stuck on a test question? Think about it. Think about it really hard. Close your eyes and press your palms to your forehead and think think think think and then—there! The answer. It pops into your mind as suddenly as a file opening on your computer.

Then I start to think. And think. And think. The result of all of this thinking? Chaos.

That’s not true, I thought. Please, stop. Please. It’s not true.

Thinking doesn’t find me a solution to the Worries. It only makes them worse. It makes them circle tighter and faster, the moths beating their wings as hard as possible, everything a tangled, awful mess.

I’ll eventually fill dozens of Worry Journals. Hundreds, maybe. I’ll see the entries as confessions, a safe way to seek forgiveness. To empty myself of the horrible things I’ve done. Each entry a little apology.

I’ll write every day. Obsessively record every shred of guilt that passes through my mind. Over time, the notebook will grow heavy with pencil markings and memory.

With Manuel, it’s different. He feels different, even if I can’t say why. I’m instantly comfortable around him in a way I’ve never been with the rest of the kids at this school. So I talk.

After a month spent in the silence of my own home, it’s an incredible release. I feel myself rise from the depths of my mind. The Worries don’t disappear, not by a long shot, but they quiet, just a little. Just while I talk.

Still, I don’t give up. I’m determined to make him my friend.

“Have you ever heard the term psychosomatic?”—an

Are they talking about me?

You have no idea how much you should hate me. I am not a good person.

How does that feel, really? Does it feel good? Or does it feel like nothing at all?”

Was keeping a secret impossible when you were keeping it from a person who knows you better than you know yourself?

I’m speaking too much. Babbling, really. But they’re comforting, the extra words. Like a cushion for the coming fall. I stuff my sentences with as many as I can—a technique I’ll use thousands of times in the future.

ONCE I EXHAUST THE LIST of past lies to apologize for, you’d think the Worries would go away. But they don’t. They just change shape.

has entered my mind, and once that happens, it’s over. I’ll never be able to unthink it. It’s just like remembering a past lie; I’ll return to this moment, this pulse, over and over.

To me, thoughts can’t be an illness. Illness implies that the change within you is not your fault. That it’s foreign. Invasive. That an army of cells broke in and started messing with your insides. That—and this is key, this is the most important part of all—with the right drugs, it will go away.

But this isn’t an illness. This can’t be cured with a few hugs and a capful of pink goo. This is me. Every thought, no matter how bizarre, no matter how disturbing—I create it. It comes from me. It’s made of me. Your thoughts are the mental manifestation of what you look like inside. Rotten thoughts? Rotten insides.

Better to just write it down in my journal. To confess to the nonjudgmental silence of an empty page.

How do you describe the first time you get drunk? The first time you fall in love?

Happiness, to me, isn’t a presence. It’s an absence. The absence of Worry. Of fear. Of sadness. Of the thoughts and compulsions that directed my life for so long.

“But then…what were you afraid of?” Me, I thought without hesitation. I was afraid of myself.

All I could do was lie and lie and lie, until the lies wound around my throat, dipped into my mouth, curled around my tongue, gagged me, choked me, left me unable to speak, to eat, to breathe.

Memory of pain is often worse than the pain itself. It drives us. What we do or don’t do, embrace or fear, repeat or avoid at all costs—all of that is dictated by our memory of pain.

I’ve long since accepted that my best friend doesn’t express emotions the way most human beings do. He buzzes at a low frequency. It’s all there—sadness, joy, excitement, frustration—but you won’t find it on his face. It’s in the air.

Love slips out just as naturally as adding how are you to the end of hello.

That’s my cure. He’s my cure.

Guilt stays with you. Forever. Next time you see your best friend, you’ll know you lied. You’ll carry that guilt everywhere you go.

At every moment, I live half in this world and half in another. One world is physical, the other invisible. I’m perfectly capable of remaining engaged in the physical one—the “real” world, the one with action and dialogue and the ever-present passage of time—while silently running through my standard list of Worries, one leading right into the next, like the endless all-caps ticker that sprints across the bottom of a newscast.

I’m doing it again—stuffing my confession with as many irrelevant details as I can. Padding the cushion I hope will soften the fall when I finally jump.

once I thought the thought, I couldn’t unthink it, you know?” Now I’m really off, really talking. Now that the confession has started, I can’t stop. “It’s out of my control.

It’s…it’s…it’s these thoughts. They won’t leave me alone. No matter how many times I tell them to. And they feel, like, weirdly separate from me, you know? Like…they don’t sound like me. Or, at least, they didn’t when they first started. Now…Now, I…I can’t really tell the difference.”

“You’re going to spend a helluva lot of time up there,” he says, reaching up one finger to tap my forehead. “Your entire life, in fact. You better get used to the shit cluttering up the floor.”