How to Fade Like Smoke in Rain

Choose an hour when light forgets how to fall

when the air carries the stillness of something left behind

Speak nothing aloud

Language is an anchor

Begin by walking away from your own name

the sound, the shape, the memory it calls

Do this slowly

as if the ground beneath you were not entirely convinced

Place your belongings in a circle of stones

One by one, turn them to face the earth

Let them forget your touch

Let your touch become myth

Your reflection must be silenced

Find a surface that has never known your face

Look into it until you feel unfamiliar

Look longer

If you pass a place, you once loved

walk through it as a stranger

Do not linger

The past is a hungry thing

Empty your voice into the hollow of a tree

Cover it with soil

Should someone call to you

answer with silence that sounds like wind through iron

Teach your body how to vanish by degrees

first the scent

then the warmth

then the shadow that clings to your heel

When your breath forgets its rhythm

and your name tastes like dirt

step beyond the final root

into the moment that waits without waiting

You will be gone

And you will leave behind

the kind of stillness

that makes others afraid to speak