The invisible people always watch. They watch everything, but they never say a word. They always have watched, and they always will. They’ll never talk. They’ll never touch anything. No one will ever see them. No one will ever know they exist. Ever. So why, you may wonder, do they watch all these people who don’t even know they exist?

A long time ago, there were no invisible people. ­Then, a man named Cain got angry at his brother. He killed his brother. And then there was one invisible person. More people got angry and killed. Sometimes they killed for reasons other than anger. Sometimes they were jealous. Sometimes they were trying to defend themselves. Once in a while, someone went mad, and killed people just for fun. Whenever someone killed, another invisible person came into being.

There were many invisible people. Invisible men and women. Invisible children. The invisible people age until they appear to be in their mid thirties—if you could see them, that is—but never die, unlike visible people. An invisible man and an invisible woman can have an invisible child. That child can in turn grow up and have children of its own. There are more invisible people than visible ones. Invisible people can’t kill each other, though—they’re already dead. Sometimes an invisible person will fall in love with a visible person. This is a truly sad scenario. The visible person can never know their invisible lover exists. The invisible person could say something or gently touch the visible person, who would turn around and see no one there. The invisible man or woman follows the visible person around until they die.

You may have deduced from my earlier statement that the invisible are the spirits of people who have died. This is not strictly true. The invisible can see each other. They can breed on their own. Not every invisible has to have a dead counterpart. Also, it is important to know that only people who are killed become invisible. If an 82 year old man dies of cancer, he will become semi visible. People will know—or think they know—that he is there, but they will not see him. To be invisible, you have to be killed. Sometimes special people can see invisibles. Oftentimes they fall in love with an invisible—you’ll find they are far kinder than most visible folk—and go off to live with them, somewhere far removed from everyone else, with the rest of the world thinking they’ve gone mad.

Some of them are angry at the living, particularly the one that killed them, and so they haunt that person. They throw things off shelves and make lights stop working. If they died particularly horribly, they might even have power enough to kill someone.

Once in a very great while, all the wrath in all the invisibles will pool together and cast a great curse upon all humanity. The last time this happened was in the first half of the 20th century. A young man from Germany started hearing the invisibles whisper in his head. They drove him mad. When he grew up, he got an atrocious mustache and tried to take over the world. The rest, as we know, is history.

Another time before then, in the mid 1300s, an angry, powerful invisible man tampered with some fleas. He put those fleas on common black rats. He wiped out one or two thirds of the population of Europe, caused a major societal upheaval, and I’m sure caused several other unsavory things.

Now that I have explained what the invisible ones are, I will return to my original point. They watch because they want to remember. They want to know what it is like to be alive. So they watch. They try to understand. They try to wrack their minds for some shred of memory. They hate us for locking them out. But some of us they like for trying to bring them back in. See, they just want to be normal. To live. They’re also waiting. They’re waiting for the time to come for them to come back. Whether to save the day or to be the thing the day needs saving from, I don’t know. But they’ll come back. You’ll see. “We’ve been watching you,” they’ll say. “You may have forgotten us. But we remember you.”

Unfortunately, whenever a human tries to remind the rest to remember them, most people just try and make them invisible too. People want to forget, see. They want to forget mistakes. Pretend they’ve never done anything wrong.

I feel I’ve tried to do my best to remind you of them now. If this doesn’t work….it was worth a shot. So just remember them. Pay your respects to the countless slaughtered dead. Have a good, interesting life. Watching us is one of the only things they can do, at least make it fun for them. Otherwise they’ll want to be like me.

Because I haven’t been invisible for too long, but in my time invisible, I know I’ve had a lot of fun watching you.