When You Start to Vanish
by Crystal Craig

There’s a shift.

It doesn’t come with ceremony,

no trumpet announcing the turn—

just a slow quiet erasure.

You are still here,

but no longer seen.

Not like before.

Once, the world tilted toward you,

for your softness, your scent,

the myth of your youth.

Now, you walk into a room

and the light does not follow.

Now, you are

too much or not enough.

Too loud, too tired, too wise,

too gray, too soft, too angry,

too invisible.

They want you frozen in time,

but only at the moment

you were most consumable.

Not when you bled for others.

Not when you broke open from grief.

Not when you became more whole

by falling apart.

There is a list—

silent, brutal—

etched into air and magazine covers:

Be thin.

Be young.

Be smooth.

Be small.

Be easy.

Be grateful for scraps.

And above all,

don’t remind anyone

that time touches us all.

You feel it in the mirror,

in the unkind eyes you borrow as your own.

You begin to wonder

if your worth expired

somewhere between stretch marks and silver hairs.

But then—

you catch her gaze.

Your friend.

Your sister.

A woman laughing from her belly,

a face creased by years of fierce living.

And you think:

She is stunning.

She is divine.

She is real.

And if you can see it in her,

that holy defiance,

that weathered grace,

then maybe—

just maybe—

you can offer the same reverence

to the woman inside your own skin.

You have not vanished.

You have become.

And you deserve to take up space.

All of it.

Now more than ever.