What happens after the big bad is defeated and the quest is over? It's not a new question, but Frieren: Beyond Journey's End answers it beautifully. Frieren is an long-lived (possibly immortal) elf who helped the Hero Party defeat the Demon King. Now she wants to get back to what she was doing before — exploring the land, collecting spells, living her long, slow life. Which is fine, at first. Until she outlives the rest of her party. Until the world moves on.

But it takes her with it: she acquires two young charges (an apprentice and a vanguard) and embarks on another quest, headed into the monster-infested north to find Aureole, the land where souls rest, in the hope of meeting her departed companions again. Because she’s still trying to work out what happened (and learns to relate to humans better, as the series goes on) and we get to also see what happens to the world after the threat of being conquered by unspeakable evil is gone.

What haunts Frieren isn't grief, exactly. She never verbalises overt sadness for what was lost, nor did she perhaps know what she had when she had it (although it’s obvious enough to the audience during some of the flashbacks). She’s not stupid, or innocent, or anything like that - she’s simply so long-lived that she doesn’t realise the importance or the power of living in the moment. There’s almost a sense that she was present for something important — she was right there — and yet somehow, she missed it.

I've been thinking about this because I am increasingly becoming invisible.

Which sounds like I am turning translucent, slowly going transparent at the edges. That would be me becoming increasingly less visible, which is altogether different.

What I mean is that people, with some regularity, simply do not see me. I'll wander into the office, settle in, get a coffee, and only after I've been there a while will a colleague's head swivel toward me with the slightly startled look of someone who has just noticed a piece of furniture has rearranged itself.

"There you are!" they'll say. "I didn't see you."

I am a large man of the brown Asian persuasion, normally quite difficult to miss. For some people, I trigger the part of the lizard brain trained to react to bears. This can come into conflict with the more modern part of the brain that considers bears to be friend-shaped, and often when I first meet someone I can see them torn between running away screaming and leaning in for a hug.

(For the record: I give good hugs. I'm quite reserved with physical touch - I'm not generally a hugger - with exceptions for special occasions like reunions and big family gatherings. Anyone may have a hug if they ask nicely, but only small children and my elders can get away with spontaneous hugs, and they should preferably be related to me!)

I take up more space in the world than most, and that means I take up a larger portion of most people's field of view. Perhaps this makes the brain see me as a landscape feature, or part of the background. In any case, people regularly fail to see me, until they suddenly do.

Once, I was waiting for a friend at the top of an escalator, directly in her line of sight as she rose into view. She looked straight at me. She got off the escalator. She took a few steps forward, close enough to touch, and only when I said her name did she register that I was standing right there.

I've started to wonder if this is something I'm doing, or not doing. Whether there's something about the way I move through spaces — quietly, without announcement — that somehow folds me into the background despite my dimensions.

If this is some kind of late-manifesting mutant power, I wish I had better control of it. I might then be able to use it for good (or for evil - I think invisibility lends itself more to evil).

When I want it to work, it doesn’t. I’ll be dressed in my most casual clothes, having headed out to the neighbourhood shops on the weekend to get some groceries, basically unshaven letting it all hang out (not literally) and THAT is when a student (inevitably accompanied by startled-looking parents) will spot me, yelling my name across the street and then pointing to the adults beside them while yelling “MY MOTHER!” and then I have to wave in a sheepish self-effacing way meant to indicate both that I don’t always dress like an indigent and also that I am actually a quite intelligent and knowledgeable and most importantly functioning member of society of sufficient standing to teach your child.

The fact that said child likes me enough to want to recognise me outside of school I take as a compliment of the highest order. I shouldn’t repay said compliment by traumatising the parents, I feel. Invisibility at that moment would come in quite handy.

Frieren, perhaps, has the opposite problem. She’s present, and visible, but not entirely engaged. This makes her visits to locations of the Hero Party’s past glories almost painfully bittersweet. She moved through decades the way I apparently move through offices — there, but not quite landing. It’s a painful reminder of something we all do, although now that I’m older, I’m better at recognising important moments. Frieren gets better.

My eyes welled up too frequently while watching the show (now airing on Netflix) either when Frieren redeemed herself or when I recognised an incident that was too analogous to something I’d lived through.

I'm not sure what the lesson is, for either of us. I don’t always want to be seen, but maybe presence is more important that visibility. In my case, wanting to be seen doesn’t always equate to being visible, and vice versa. And maybe I’m better at occupying space than I am at capturing attention.

(Or I have a mutant power that I can’t control yet. I’ll keep you posted.)