A Slight Return.

On Vanishing, Being Hacked, and the Return to Writing

One day, you are here, fully present. The next, you are gone, vanished into the pixelated ether. It happens suddenly. A notification, a flicker of interference, and then your words—years of them—are no longer your own. You have been hacked.

It is a strange sensation, this particular kind of disappearance. Not a physical vanishing, no smoke or mirrors, no closed-door mystery. Instead, it is a dissolution into code, a forced estrangement from the thing that makes you most yourself: your words. They are locked away or worse, paraded under someone else’s name. You try to log in, to reclaim them, but the gates have been sealed. It is like standing outside your own house, peering in through the window, watching a stranger rearrange the furniture.

You think about retreat. A kind of self-imposed vanishing. After all, if the words are no longer safe, if the walls can be breached so easily, why write at all? You remember stories of people who stepped back, left their manuscripts in drawers, their paintings in storage. You think of Agnes Martin walking away from art for years, of J.D. Salinger retreating into silence. A kind of freedom, perhaps, in not being known.

But writing is an instinct, a compulsion as much as a craft. It is the way you make sense of the world, the way you reconstitute yourself when you feel most unmoored. So you return. Hesitantly at first, fingers hovering over the keys. It feels strange, like stepping into a space that was once familiar but is now tinged with the uncanny. You test the boundaries, check for weaknesses. You write about vanishing, about being hacked, about returning.

Because what else is there to do but return? To reclaim, to rebuild, to write your way back into existence.