Cycle I: Coming on Strong
The Hidden Voice
The Hidden Girl · 10 (v2.00)
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan
Playlist Track: The Marías — “No One Noticed”
The person who remembers almost everything notices that she has gone quiet.
They remember that silence means she is upset because she apparently told them once.
She does not remember saying it.
The search inside their conversation does. Her own sentence appears between a joke she forgot and a photograph she barely remembers sending.
They do not ask her to explain. They only want her to know they noticed.
She likes being noticed.
Then the kindness starts to sound familiar.
She searches the text in her old screenshots for the word quiet. The phone brings up a conversation she thought she had buried deeper. The account no longer exists, but she still has the screenshots.
The old conversation is not cruel all the way through. There are jokes she still finds funny, pictures sent only to make her laugh, and questions that once felt like care.
Farther down, the messages start explaining her to herself. Her silence means something only that person understands. Being left alone with it starts to sound dangerous. Nobody else notices enough. The constant checking begins to look necessary.
Each sentence makes being known sound more like being managed.
In the screenshot above those messages, she finds herself writing, “nobody notices until i come back.”
She had remembered being told that nobody else noticed.
She had forgotten how much she wanted someone to.
She selects the screenshots and touches the trash icon. A confirmation fills the screen.
Deleting them would not help her understand what happened. It would only make the next version harder to check.
She presses Cancel.
Back in the current conversation, another message is waiting. They want to know whether they misunderstood her.
She types, “no. you always notice.”
She sends it before deciding how long always is supposed to mean.
Then she returns to the screenshots and checks that Cancel worked.
Her sentence is still there above theirs.
She reads hers first this time.