I do not want to disappear.
That would be too kind,
too convenient a magic trick—
one blink,
no witness.
No,
I want to leave.
To unhook my name from the register of clocks,
to set fire to the ledgers where my hours are kept.
To walk backwards out of this citadel of obligation,
and find sanctuary
in a place where silence
isn't absence
but presence
turned inward.
I want to pull my life savings
not like a string of pearls
but like a vein from the wrist of a dream—
raw, final—
book a one-way flight to the edge of the known,
some dry-sunned monastery
hidden in the far ribs of Australia
where the wind is wiser than men,
where eucalyptus prayers linger
long after the monks have forgotten their mouths.
I will wear linen that remembers no logos.
I will eat broth that has never seen plastic.
I will learn to breathe
in the spaces between prayers,
where language drowns and something holier
floats to the surface
like a dead leaf with no name.
Let the world I once adored
keep spinning on its rusted spindle—
its economies and elegies,
its cathedral of deadlines,
its empire of dopamine,
its hunger for spectacle,
its guillotine of inboxes.
Let it all roar past me
like a train I chose not to board,
my ticket dissolved
in the milk-rain of some first honest dawn.
Because I do love this world,
and I hate that I do.
It's the cruelest tension—
to love the hand that guts you,
to weep over beauty
while walking backward into stillness,
to want to be saved
but not reentered.
If God wills it,
let Him take me by the aching part—
not the mind,
but the marrow.
Not the voice,
but the longing behind it.
Not my Sunday prayers,
but the crushed petals I keep beneath my tongue
on Thursdays,
when I feel most far from Him.
Tell me,
is it cowardice
to seek stillness this violently?
To fantasize about a peace
so deep it forgets my name?
To want a life that doesn't require
an audience?
I am tired of humming.
I want to become
the hollowed instrument,
the silence
that taught the cello how to ache.
