I tie the scarf around my wrists the way I tie my shoelaces—automatic, rehearsed—because the alternative is a lifetime of small disappearances. I want someone to find the outline of me and name it: Marco, not the man who forgets to pay the electric bill or says sorry twice for every anger. I leave the living room overturned, a messy calling card, and I call my sister from a payphone so there's proof I wasn't swallowed by silence. When Anna arrives and sees the scarf, she drops into me like gravity; her fear is the only honest thing I've staged. Detective Alvarez asks why I did it and I tell her because I needed to know who would come. People spin motives—debts, affairs, madness—because those fit headlines; the true thing doesn't. I wanted rescue not for spectacle but to be permitted, by other people's care, to stop pretending I was fine. When the police close the file and life settles back into its small, ordinary cruelties, I keep the list I wrote in my pocket: names to call, habits to break, the slow work of staying. The scarf goes in the trash. The staying does not.
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