Do you ever want to disappear? You, reader. Warm blooded human I’ve never met. Do you ever reach impasses in the road where it might just feel easier to quickly and quietly dissolve into the ether? Do you ever feel the cartilage that separates the ideal from the reality rubbing against your new skin? Doesn’t it sometimes just feel worthwhile to cut it out completely?

Not to worry, dear reader. These are just things I plead with the sunset about. A monolithic thunderhead lords over the sky tonight, dyed in the death of the day. Take me with you, I beg of it. Not to the end of the light, but somewhere higher and cooler and wetter, where I no longer need be any of this.

Are we all but concentrates that need watering down? Are we beautiful succulent fish whose sweet flesh is riddled with small, pokey bones? Does anyone else feel like they’re walking through the crawl spaces of life with their elbows out? Why can’t I ever tuck them in?

I’m afraid I’ve become far too comfortable living in the power of all of me. I’m afraid that that admission has teeth. But it does feel like the tonic would go down more easily if I just opened my restricted throat.

I hear it, I know. Come morning, I may not feel these things at all. But tonight, in the wake of that thunderhead, I find myself wondering what it would be like to…evaporate. Nothing dramatic, nothing gruesome. Just here one moment, and the next gone. Slipping out the door of the confines of my electric corporeal solitary confinement.

I’m tired, dear reader, of doing hard things. Of being brave. Of being open to the intermittent crashing of the waves. I want my bones to spread out in this skin. I want to easily occupy my slice of the ether. I want to stop fighting myself, I want to stop being fought. I want to feel like this borrowed breath is worth something at the end of a long day. And whenever it may be deemed not to be, I appeal to the heavens for the grace to quietly and quickly disappear.