And the farewell letter went something like this:
I started the day with an affirmation, a term resoundingly kitsch in an age of everything packaged for the spiritualist or recovering something or other in all of us. I could call it an intention, a wish or a note to self to suit my more cynical needs. I will not call it a resolution. First, it is too early for resolutions, the new year still a couple of weeks away, and second, I am not waiting two weeks to act. I have already decided in whole or in part this goal in action.
Soon I will disappear. My aim for today and tomorrow until fully accomplished, is to become invisible. The process started a couple of years ago when I toppled from the pinnacle of respectability only to land flat on my ass on the untouchables’ cement floor of society’s seething underclass. Thereafter, they started slowly, one by one by two and more, to forget me, the people who wanted to be near me before the fall, those self-proclaimed humanists. Turns out selective humanists crave less unsavory humans.
It only took a bit of ignoring and then some looking away for me to begin to disappear. From there, my reflex to shun the shunners lightened my shades of skin, hair, bone and eyes even more. But then the nose grind to recovery, the working endless hours with my head bent over my body, over my computer, over myself, kept me from seeing the rest of them, the strangers and people never met in person nor online, the unfriending and closing up shop, prevented me from knowing anyone existed but my inner circle.
And finally, to date, my love affair with those discreet few who have refused my refusal, love me despite the growing imperfections wrinkling with age–like me–and worn for use and abuse, as well as my continued affair with the word, a lifetime infatuation, the one true love that has never waned, never left and never judged, has nearly obliterated my presence among the living. Seclusion, surrendered suction into the recesses of imagination and thought, a comfortable den, affirms by the ease with which I slip ever more into that n’other world that I will one day be invisible. And I am glad. So I affirm to continue as I am, ever strengthening inside my own germinating vine climbing the walled off society I peer at occasionally from over the ledge.
In the gaze of the other 