He Keeps Vanishing and Your Time Keeps Disappearing with Him

Let’s say a man you’ve been dating disappears for ten days.

No explanation, no particular fuss. One minute you are having a perfectly pleasant conversation, and the next he has slipped quietly off the face of the earth with the ease of somebody who has done this before.

Then your phone lights up...

“Hey, stranger.”

Stranger?

Sir, you are the one who left.

Still, he is charming, you are pleased to hear from him, and within six messages the missing ten days have been quietly swept under the carpet. He asks what you have been doing, you tell him, and eventually you get around to the small matter of where he disappeared to.

He has been busy.

Of course.

And just like that, the show begins again, because dating a vanisher is less like having a relationship and more like attending a very long magic act in which the magician keeps disappearing, reappearing and somehow convincing you that the interesting part is what happens next.

The Return Is Part of the Trick

At first, the trick is almost impressive.

He vanishes for a few days, comes back warm and attentive, and for a little while everything feels completely normal again. He remembers something you told him, makes you laugh, maybe even suggests seeing you, and suddenly the magician is back onstage as though nobody had noticed the empty space where he was standing.

You hardly have time to wonder where he went before the conversation becomes good again, and this is what makes the vanisher so effective. He does not disappear permanently, which would be much too useful. Instead, he comes back just often enough to keep the whole thing alive.

A little longer and you might have recovered completely, which would be terribly inconvenient.

At least a permanent disappearance tells you something. Eventually you look at the empty stage, realize nobody is coming back out, collect your things and go home. A vanisher, however, seems to understand the enormous possibilities of an encore.

So when he sends a message after twelve silent days, up goes the curtain again. And because he has actually come back—which by now feels almost like a magnificent event—the return starts looking terribly meaningful.

One little message, and look at us—we have already turned “Hey” into a comeback story.

And look at him now. Back again. Really, one has to admire the commitment to the craft.
By this point he has disappeared and reappeared often enough
to deserve a title—Magician of the Year, Supreme Vanisher and Keeper of the Mysterious “Hey.”
And judging by the warm welcome every time he pops back in, the act is clearly still a hit.
Same trick, same man, same delighted reception.
At some point even he must be thinking:
why change the show when everybody keeps staying for it?

And even though he has not actually done anything yet except reappear, somehow that is enough to get everybody seated again.

The Show Has Been Running for Months

This is where the whole thing gets rather clever. Hardly any relationship may be happening at all, and somehow months are still passing.

You speak for three days, he disappears for eight, he comes back for four, and then he is gone again. There may be a lovely evening together somewhere in the middle, followed by enough silence for you to reconsider the entire thing.

And just as you begin doing exactly that—

Ta-da.

A message.

It almost seems as though he has an alarm set for the exact moment you stop caring.

From farther back, the pattern is almost magnificent. This man may have been in your life for seven months while personally attending perhaps three weeks of it.

There are summer rentals with longer occupancy.

And yet those seven months count. You waited through them, wondered through them, reopened the door and had little bursts of hope along the way. You mentioned him to friends, stopped mentioning him to friends, and then had to mention him again because, well, look who has reappeared.

The man himself has barely been present, but his absence has been terribly busy.

That is the peculiar talent of the vanisher: he can take up enormous amounts of space without actually being there.

And every time he comes back, the last disappearance somehow shrinks a little. You are pleased to see the magician back onstage, after all. Nobody wants to ruin the reunion by asking why he spent half the show behind the curtain.

And besides, he is being lovely now.

Madam, he has been lovely for forty-eight hours. The orchestra may remain seated.

And after this many disappearances, one almost has to admire the consistency.

Eventually, You Learn the Trick

After enough performances, something rather inconvenient happens: you stop being surprised.

When he disappears again, you no longer spend quite so much time wondering what happened. You already know the rhythm. First comes the silence, then enough time for the whole thing to begin fading nicely at the edges, and finally, just when your interest is packing a small bag and heading elsewhere, your phone lights up.

“Hey.”

Of course it does.

At this point, one little “Hey” is doing the work normally associated with a handwritten letter and a horse.

And suddenly the magician looks a little less mysterious. Nothing new has happened and no secret has been revealed. He has simply performed the same trick again, while you have become extremely familiar with the trapdoor.

That is when the strangest part of the whole act becomes visible.

It was never only him disappearing.

Weeks disappeared too.

Then months.

A season changed while you were waiting to see whether a man who had gone quiet would become interested again. Your life carried on, naturally, but one little corner of it stayed oddly available in case he popped up again.

And that is quite a generous booking for somebody who rarely turns up.

Eventually, he vanishes again. Well, of course he does. Only this time, somewhere in the audience, a woman looks at her watch, picks up her purse and heads for the exit.

She has seen this trick before. Quite a few times, actually.

The magician can reappear whenever he likes, but this time, she is not staying for the encore.

Because the most revealing part of the disappearing act was not that he kept vanishing—it was how many months of your life kept vanishing along with him.