Used to Like Me

They liked me better when I was easier to carry.

Back then I had this feeling I was being held up by other people’s hands, even when they weren’t touching me. I’d walk into a room and feel it—like I’d been expected, like I fit into the space the way a chair fits under a table. Nobody questioned it. Least of all me.

We drank a lot in those days. Or maybe it just feels that way now, looking back through whatever this is. The air had that burnt, late-night smell to it, like something had already happened and we were just breathing what was left. People said things about me then. Good things. Harmless things. “He’s solid.” “He’s one of us.” I let it sit on me like a coat I didn’t have to earn.

I didn’t notice when it started to slip.

It wasn’t one moment. It was a series of small misalignments. Conversations that bent in strange places. People repeating things I didn’t remember saying, but not in a way you could correct. More like they were reminding me of a version of myself I’d misplaced.

“You remember that night,” someone said, and I nodded, because there’s a way people look at you when you don’t.

After a while, the stories got sharper.

I heard I’d crossed a line. Then another. Then lines I didn’t recognize as lines at all. The details didn’t hold together, but they gathered weight anyway, like wet clothes. Someone said I’d made them afraid. Someone else said worse. Words that don’t wash off once they land. Words that come with pictures already attached.

I tried to trace them back, find where they started, but it was like following footprints that kept changing direction behind me.

At night I’d lie there and go over everything. Every conversation, every room, every face. I started to doubt the edges of things. There were gaps I couldn’t account for. Minutes that didn’t belong anywhere. I’d catch myself thinking, what if I did say it? What if I did stand too close, or stay too long, or look the wrong way at the wrong time?

Memory isn’t built for defense. It just keeps rearranging the furniture.

I saw one of them at a gas station off the highway. Middle of the day, heat coming up off the pavement like something alive. He looked at me like I’d already done something, like the act was still happening and he’d just walked in on it.

“You’ve changed,” he said.

I almost laughed. It felt like the wrong line from the right scene.

“I guess,” I said.

But what I wanted to ask him was when. When exactly did it happen? Was there a day I crossed over into this other person they keep describing? Did I wake up as him, or did they build him slowly, piece by piece, until there wasn’t room left for anything else?

He didn’t stick around. People don’t, once they’ve decided what you are. It simplifies things for them.

After that, the world started to feel thinner. Like there was less between me and whatever people thought they saw. I’d walk past windows and catch my reflection and not recognize the posture, the angle of the head. I started avoiding mirrors altogether. They felt complicit.

The worst part isn’t the accusations. It’s how quickly they become a kind of gravity. Things start orbiting them. Every silence means something. Every glance confirms it. You can feel yourself being arranged into a shape you didn’t choose.

I kept thinking about those early days, how easy it was. How being beneath notice was a kind of protection. Nobody needs a villain when everyone knows their place.

But once you move—once you stop needing them, or they think you don’t—the balance goes strange. It tilts. And suddenly there’s a gap where you used to be, and something has to fill it.

A story, maybe. A warning. A reason things feel the way they do.

I don’t know if it’s envy. I don’t know if it’s fear. Those words feel too clean for what this is.

All I know is that somewhere along the line, I became useful again.

Just not in the way I was before.

Now I’m the thing they point to when they need to remember who they are.