when i said i wanted to be gone, i meant gone forever, gone with the wind, gone in the truest, most cryptic sense of the word. not death, no, i wouldn't disrespect it that way. i meant gone, silent, like a memory that has blurred away, like tides lapping on rugged stone walls and dragging with them what debris of memory there was, tugging imprints of laughter and the many palms that has touched it down the shorelines, to the deep, deeper and deeper still, to where the waters has silenced all. i meant gone like the fading scent of an emptied perfume bottle or the deteriorating photo albums of a childhood long robbed and bent and snapped in two, erased from my spine and skin. i meant gone, where i didn't get lost on purpose so you'd come find me and hold my hand and bring me home. i meant the never-found, never-seen-again, a mystery echoing in the walls, in places i frequent, a ghost but never dead. just a sudden, sudden, vanishing, where you'd see silhouettes of me in that one favorite bookstore i lurk in, where you'd see my face in the halls of a library or hear my voice reciting poems in a corner i claimed eternally mine, where you'd find traces of my breaths in glass windows only to find i was never there. i want to be gone and i want you to find peace in my vanishing. you know i do not want to be found. i will be alright. never worry. never fear for me.
