Too gentle to notice

Step 1. Wake before the birds.

Forget your name for seven breaths.

Let the silence between them shape your outline.

Step 2. Leave your phone on the nightstand.

Let it ring.

Let it mourn.

Step 3. Dress in echoes.

Pick the sweater with the stretched-out sleeves.

The one that remembers the shape of your sorrow.

Step 4. Drink something warm and unsweetened.

Let the bitterness remind you that you’re still here.

But only just for a moment

Step 5. Walk until the concrete forgets your feet.

Past the mailbox, past the houses with children’s chalk on the steps,

past the last place you felt real.

Step 6. Turn once. Only once.

To wave at the version of you

that almost stayed.

Step 7. Erase your scent with cedar smoke and salt.

Bury your keys beneath a nameless tree.

No one should follow.

Step 8. Speak only in questions.

“What time is it?”

“Have you seen someone like me?”

“Do you remember the sound of your own voice?”

Step 9. Learn the wind’s handwriting.

Read the notes it leaves in your hair.

Answer with a whisper or not at all.

Step 10. Sleep in new places.

Under bridges. In forgotten motels.

Between the sentences of old love letters.

Step 11. Let the memories rot like bruised fruit.

They were sweet.

Now they are compost.

Step 12. Become a rumor.

Something someone once saw in the corner of a dream.

A shimmer. A sigh. A maybe.

Step 13. Leave no trace but poetry.

And even then,

write it in fog.

This is how to vanish

not all at once,

but gently

like the sound of your name

slipping through water.