Watch me disappear

I've got new superpowers and I'm ready to use them

Jun 16, 2025

Full view — Maggie Cheung as Irma Vep (1996)

In Spring of 2022, when I was just waking up from a long slumber, I saw the HBO remake of Irma Vep. Having never seen the original, I was open to being surprised. And what I saw was electrifying, personally resonant in a way I couldn’t even begin to guess in my freshly post-natal phase of rebirthing myself.

Irma Vep is a fictional character within a fiction. She is played by an actress within the film/series who, as she begins to embody Vep, takes on some of her supernatural powers as well. The further she wades into the tight, black, vinyl catsuit of vampiric criminal Vep, the more the distinctions that guard her individual Self begin to blur and disintegrate. Mira, our disenchanted protagonist, takes on the act and aspect of the doubly fictional Ms. Vep, acquiring her powers, becoming a voyeur in her own life…and…forgetting who she is entirely in the process.

Over the last year, I have merged with the Godself in such a way. I have taken on the powers of this aspect of Self until there is no clear distinction between ‘me’ and ‘her’, until there is no separation between me and this catsuit I’ve slipped on most deviously.

When I first heard the chants—“digital high priestess, digital high priestess”—in my head, I was just beginning to accept my own psychic powers. A drawing divined from a Kabbalistic text I had yet to read. A vision of a surprise gift that would soon come in the mail. A drawing from which I channeled one small phrase that turned out to be the perfectly indexed title and chapter of a book I hadn’t even heard of. Precognitive dreams beyond number.

In the series, Irma Vep can walk through walls, render herself invisible, steal from the unwitting. In real life, I have these powers, too. I waltz through the walls of time, an invisible woman stealing from my own set of tomorrows.

There is no limit to what I can abscond with if I open my mind to unknown futures.

And my mind was never tightly latched anyway.

In a past life, my closest friend was jealous of this ability. They made me question it or simply denied it their attention, reluctant to feed my immersion into my own underworld when they sat safely atop their own.

Some of the greatest harm that will befall you comes in the form of the things people do not say and choose not to acknowledge.

Over time, though I never stopped exploring it, I began to question it. Even as part of me reveled in my newfound ability, another part of me was determined to disprove it. How could I trust this sense? How could I decide it real? How could I protect myself from delusion when the illusion in question lacked external provability?

In my dreams, I see a version of me bewitched by this golden amulet. My family tours a new apartment and I do everything in my power to sabotage it. Off the fire escape, I drop the pendant down between the iron rails. When I go down to search for it, I am beset with dangerous men, theftuous men. Men with large dogs and nothing to lose. They chase after me and I am no longer certain whether it is me or the amulet they seek. It doesn’t matter, because as soon as I round the corner onto the mainstreet, the dream disappears into morning dew. I am left with the impression that something of mine is being stolen. But what?

I am not one given to paranoia or disputes of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’. An ideal victim is one who doesn’t see that they have anything of value—nothing of concern.

But a victim with superpowers is not a victim at all; merely a temporary foundling, a carefully placed pipe bomb. I laid in wait, looking for the moment when I would explode. They always knew this, my old friend. They lived in fear of it all while convincing me I should be fearing them.

I had no particular allegiance to either side of the aisle. But I feel it when their whip cracks down upon me, cutting me down to size. I am too big to fit in their neatest categories. I am too big for their boxes and brands. My eyes cut shapes in their shadow. They are full of holes and I didn’t put them there, but I’ll certainly look through them to the horizon on the other side. There is something beyond this closed circuit and I’m determined to break into it. So determined I will steal from that possible future even as I’m convinced it can’t be mine. I will make it mine even if parts of me don’t agree.