This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/LiquidDongorong on 2026-08-10 16:01:10+00:00.

---

People can’t see me anymore.

I can still interact with the world, push doors, shove people out of my way. They’ll flinch and swear, but their eyes don’t land on me. They just keep going about their day like whatever happened was completely random, or their own fault. But it’s never me. It’s never me.

Let me back up.

I’m a college freshman. I get pretty decent grades, and I have a decent friend group that gets together once or twice a week to play games and waste our time.

I’ve always felt a bit like a fly on the wall, but honestly, that’s where I’m the most comfortable. Whenever I do jump into conversations, I tend to take them over. So most of the time, I sit there and listen.

Everyone has their own thing. Jeff is the quarterback on the football team. Sam’s learning accounting. Josh is a film buff. Me, I’m usually just there, a pretty face among a group of guys. I still haven’t figured out my major.

About a week and a half ago, we were doing our usual weekly gaming sesh. I stepped outside for a smoke. The wind was bad that night, and I couldn’t get my lighter to work.

An unassuming man in a corduroy suit walked up to me from the dark and offered to help. I didn’t register him until he held out his lighter.

One of our professors, I think. I’d seen him putzing around campus before, a frizzy head of hair, a delicate voice. We talked for a few minutes. He asked how I was doing, why I was out here in the cold instead of with my friends. I pointed at my cigarette. He laughed and shook his head, asking me if I felt valuable to those people. It was a weird question, somewhat forward, but his voice was warm and he genuinely seemed like he was trying to help.

I told him the truth, that I felt more like an accessory than anything else. That I’ve always felt average, how everyone else has their lane, and I’m still looking for mine.

He got a strange look in his eyes. Sympathy, maybe, but there was something else in his suddenly-dilated pupils.

“So you can see me?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah, I can see you.”

He chuckled beneath his breath, starting to walk away.

“We’re kindred spirits, you and me. If you need anybody to talk to, come by my office. 337 in Armstrong.”

Odd request, but whatever, I thought. I finished my cigarette and went back inside.

Nobody really registered me coming in. They were locked on their screens, only saying hi after the door clicked shut. I left a little bit later without saying anything. I think that’s the night it all started.

The next morning, nobody seemed to look at me. Not in the hallway or in class, not when I sat down at my usual table. The teacher didn’t take my attendance, though I’d been raising my hand.

I saw Jeff later at the lunch table, and tried to say hello. He didn’t respond. I shoved his shoulder hard enough that he almost dropped his plate. He rubbed the spot, glanced around like somebody had bumped into him, then went right back to talking with everyone else.

I still had my phone. Texts went through, calls connected. They could hear my voicemails just fine, but were acting like I wasn’t three feet away from them. I thought it was some shitty prank at first. When we got to the commons, I tried to prove it. I sat on the arm of the couch close to Jeff and texted the group chat.

‘I’m right here. Look up.’

Three dots appeared.

‘LOL, where?’

Sam texted me to stop being weird. I texted again.

‘Look on the couch. I’m right next to Jeff.’

They all glanced in my direction and shrugged. Josh said something about me tripping. I stood up, walked right in front of him, and punched him in the nose. Not a love tap. Hard enough that blood started immediately. He clapped both his hands over his face and tipped backward into the cushions. The others jumped.

“Jesus! What the hell?!”

Nobody looked at me. They hovered around him, asking if he needed ice, if he’d hit the coffee table. I stood there with my knuckles stinging, questioning if I’d been going crazy, if I died long ago and this was a ghostly experience. Anything made more sense than flat-out not existing. The group chat lit up with messages about how clumsy Josh is. My messages sat there unanswered.

I lasted a few more days before looking for the old professor. His office should have been on the third floor of Armstrong, the one that always reeked like mold.

The door wasn’t there.

Sure, there was a 336 and a 338, but no 337. I walked back and forth a few times.

All of a sudden, I could see it—not a door per se, but a short hallway cut in between the two others. I stepped down and found a door on the left. It was labelled as “Dr. Leon’s.”

I stepped inside. Leon was sitting behind the desk, waiting for me. It was the first time anybody had perceived me in days. His office was cluttered with papers and old books. A giant chalkboard was hidden beneath a large tarp in the corner.

“You came,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

I shut the door. “What the fuck is happening to me?”

He didn’t answer right away, pointing to the chair across from him.

“Did you know this campus has the highest rate of disappearances in the country?” he asked. “Officially, it’s nothing. A few transfer students who never showed, and a couple of dropouts who stopped answering their emails. But if you really dig, the pattern’s there. People stop being noticed. They stop coming to class. They stop existing. Not a single person seems to notice that anything is wrong.”

He opened a drawer and set a black-and-white photograph on the desk. A man in a suit standing in front of a brick building, the same face as the one in front of me. The car in the background and the clothes put it somewhere in the 1940s.

“I’ve been like this for a very long time,” he said. “You’re the only person who’s seen me in years.”

I stared at the photo. “What happened to the others?”

He looked away, at the floor. Said they’d been “forgotten.”

Leon mentioned his wife. She’d been in a nursing home across town. He said he goes every week to sit by her bed and hold her hand. She never looks at him. The nurses walk through the space he occupies as if it’s empty air.

“I think we’ve crossed some kind of boundary,” he told me. “We’ve become something that only fully exists when the right eyes are looking. Everyone else fails to measure us.”

He stood and pulled the tarp off the shape in the corner. Calculations ran on for feet upon feet, yards upon yards. Quantum physics that I didn’t understand, not one bit. Sketches of a machine, something like a walk-through metal detector. He said the idea behind the machine was that if he could create a strong enough force of observation, or some kind of artificial quantum entanglement, we might be able to pull ourselves back to reality. He told me he was never very good with math, just enough to keep on trying.

We walked through the diagrams. Half of them went over my head: superposition, observer effects, something about bleeding dimensions.

The floor beneath his feet started to change. It was like a dark stain, a thick circle of black oil spreading outward beneath him without a sound. He looked down, and all the color drained from his face.

“No,” he said, “not yet.”

Hands, meaty ones, sprouted from the pool. Too many fingers. That same oily black. They wrapped around his ankles, causing him to stagger. They wrapped around his knees, his waist, his arms. They enveloped him totally, dragging him down. He begged me, his voice cracking, to tell his wife that he was there, that he was always there, that he never left. The hands pulled. His body flickered in and out of reality, solid, transparent, solid again, like a poor signal on a television. He screamed her name, and the oil closed over his head, and the floor was floor again. No stain or ripple, no trace of the man who had stood before me.

I’ve been in his office in and out for around three days. Sketches are still there. The machine is slowly coming together, emphasis on slowly. I can’t wrap my head around these notes. They’re everywhere. The handwriting gets shakier and shakier the further along I go.

I can feel it starting. The edges of my body are getting soft. When I look at my hands, they take an extra second to catch up. The group chat still answers my texts, but slower, like they’re already forgetting the shape of me on the other end.

I’m trying to finish the work that Leon started. I don’t know if the machine works. I don’t know if he was even close.

I’m writing this now because I need verification, proof that someone, anyone, knows that I exist, even if it’s just through text, even if it’s only for a second.

Please don't forget about me.