"How to Disappear"

INSTRUCTIONS FOR DISAPPEARING

(Read slowly. Follow loosely. Leave no trace.)

1. Choose your moment.

Not all exits come with fanfare.

Wait for a still hour—

early morning mist, or the lull between

questions no one asked and the silence that follows.

Feel for the thinning thread that holds you here.

When it weakens, tug.

Don’t look back yet.

There is no door—only soft unraveling.

2. Strip your name like bark from a tree.

It will come off in splinters. Let it.

Lay each syllable down like coins at a river’s edge.

You will not need them where you're going.

If someone calls out behind you,

pretend the wind has more authority.

Forget how you once answered.

3. Take only what remembers you.

Not the photos, they are liars.

Not the letters, they are cages.

Take instead the rhythm of your footfall,

the tilt of your head when it rains,

the smell of lilac you thought you forgot

but didn’t.

Carry silence like a satchel.

It weighs more than you think.

4. Disappear into the woods.

Not just any woods—

the kind that knows your middle name.

Step off the trail when the moss begins to glow.

Walk until sound forgets you.

The leaves will speak, but not in words.

Lie down when the canopy

feels like a cathedral.

Breathe in earth. Become boundaryless.

5. Or disappear into memory.

Return to the kitchen you were six in.

Touch the countertop you couldn’t reach.

Watch your mother stir something forgotten.

Try not to speak.

Memory is glass—

too many words and it shatters.

Stand still enough, and the past won’t notice

you’re older now.

6. If you choose to vanish into someone else—

be gentle.

Love is not camouflage,

though it wears well.

Learn the maps of their hands,

their thunder and fault lines.

But do not build your shelter there.

People are weather.

And some storms forget what they destroy.

7. To disappear into yourself—

close every door inside your skin.

Dim the hallway lights of your ribs.

Sink past your own thoughts.

You’ll find the version of you that never left the bed,

the one who kept watch through everything.

Sit with them.

Ask nothing.

Let them braid your breath with theirs.

8. Learn to be unseen.

Not invisible. Just unremarkable.

A leaf among leaves.

A shadow mistaken for shade.

Walk with quiet ankles.

Speak less.

Smile only when necessary,

like punctuation.

9. Forget the language of arrival.

No need to know what comes next.

Disappearing is not a journey forward—

it’s a soft spiral inward,

a collapse into essence.

Time may reach for you,

but offer it only your echo.

10. Make peace with the vanishing.

You are not being erased.

You are being rewritten

in the script of riverbeds,

in the hush of foxes crossing snow.

Somewhere, someone will say,

“I wonder where they went.”

Smile, even if they’ll never see it.

11. Finally—leave a trace only you understand.

A stone turned upside-down.

A feather tied to a fence post.

A stanza whispered to a passing crow.

The world will call it coincidence.

But you’ll know:

You are not gone.

Only elsewhere.

And that is enough