Small Comfort

Jan 4th, 2013 10:57:21pm

I am not a magician, but I know how to make myself disappear.

I can vanish. Whenever I want. In broad daylight or in the cover of dark nights. I can go away and never be seen again by those I do not want to be seen by. They will never hear from me, never learn my fate, always wonder. Should I ever decide to ease their angst and let them know I am still alive, still well, they will never be able to trace the call.

I know how to hide. How to survive. How to fight and defend and make the most out of so very, very little. I am smart. I can plan this down to the smallest detail and come out of it a winner in the art of being missed. What a delicate, decadent art it is.

However…

“The pleasure isn’t in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.” 
― John Green, Paper Towns

So instead of leaving, I plan. When things get hard and all I want is to walk out the door, I step back, breathe deep, and plan it. Every detail. How it’ll work. What will happen. The consequences good and bad. The freedom. The fear. Then I am okay.

Not because I am a coward who plans and plans yet never follows through, but because I know that the day is coming, with increasing velocity, when I will have to choose. Choose between scheming some more, or saying “fuck it” and walking out of a life I never wanted to live in the first place.

And when that day comes, best believe I am not going to let it screw up the life I do want to lead when I decide to walk out the door. I will know exactly where I am going, and how I’m going to get there. It may not all go according to the things I will scribble into notebooks on days I long for the pages to come alive and suck me in already. Nothing ever does. But the big parts will, because they have to, because I will make it so.

Then the pleasure will be both in the planning and in the doing, and I will be gone.