# Imperceptibility The way a stone becomes the earth again, slowly, without announcement— that is how I am learning to disappear. Not all at once. Not with fanfare or the clutch of goodbye. But grain by grain, like sand through the neck of an hourglass, each moment taking something small, something I barely noticed I possessed. First, the edges blur. The sharp definition of *I* softens into the landscape of *we*. Then the colors fade— not to grey, but into the greens and browns around me, until I am indistinguishable from the moss on a northern stone. No one marks the moment. There is no ceremony for this kind of leaving, no flowers, no final words. Just the quiet arithmetic of days subtracting me from myself, the way light thins at dusk without ever announcing darkness. And it is not sad, this imperceptibility. It is almost a relief— to stop insisting on my own outline, to let the boundaries go soft, to be absorbed back into the great indifference that made me. The way a stone becomes the earth again. The way a name dissolves into the mouth that spoke it. The way I am learning to be no one, and in that nothingness, finally, to become whole.

I am shortening my conversations more and more often.
I am less and less interested in who, when and why said words they will regret, but it will be too late.
I am silent for longer and longer, before the frothing words of a friend who later becomes a stranger to me.
It's one thing to hear the truth, it's another to wonder how I earned that tone.

I sift through what wounds me,
learning from what is done to me to teach myself.
I understand the difference between loving and 'I'm fine with you.'
I step forward faster and faster, indifferent to the eyes I once trusted.
Increasingly, I am not answering phone calls.
Because those who seek me today,
they allowed themselves to disappear from me when I was once searching for them.

The deeper I wade into the summer of my years, the more convinced I grow that my friends will thin
at the cost of all those who managed to slip into my world for a while, and then I chose to forget for a long time.
Because man does not change, but reveals himself.

Before those who don't believe you care about them,
Where there is you for someone, and they find you...
With a word. A call. A letter. A flower.
With a card from which only one painted smile glows.
I say goodbye to the rest.
Slowly and slowly.
Almost without trace.