(A Practical Guide for the Already Gone)
First: You will not be missed.
Not really. Not by the inbox. Not by the apps. Not by the people who liked your photo but forgot your birthday.
The machine moves on. The feed refreshes.
No one notices the ghost until the dishes pile up.
Second: Don’t wait for permission.
There is no right time.
No horoscope alignment. No green light from your HR-approved mentor.
One day you just stop replying.
You buy the ticket. You take the train.
You tell no one, or maybe just the bartender.
Third: Leave badly.
Forget closure. Forget neat endings tied up with gratitude and bullet points.
Burn the bridge. Salt the earth.
Walk out halfway through the meeting and don’t bother closing the door.
Fourth: Delete it all.
The apps. The contacts. The calendars. The cloud.
Especially the cloud.
You won’t need reminders where you’re going.
Fifth: Pack light.
One bag. One shirt. One book you never finish.
No itinerary. No plan. No insurance.
The lighter you travel, the harder you are to trace.
Sixth: Learn to love silence again.
Airports with no WiFi. Towns with no signal. Long stretches of road with nothing but static on the dial and your own dumb thoughts for company.
That’s where it happens. The unraveling. The remembering.
That’s where you start to disappear for real.
Seventh: Don’t send postcards.
Not yet.
They’ll say you’re running away.
They’ll be right.
Eighth: Trust strangers.
Especially the drunk ones. Especially the old ones. Especially the ones who speak in riddles and smell like diesel and sadness.
They know the shortcuts. They know the exits.
They’ll teach you how to vanish without leaving a trace.
Ninth: Stay gone longer than you should.
Change your name. Lose your watch. Sleep in places without addresses.
Forget the day. Forget the month. Forget the reasons you left in the first place.
Tenth: When they ask what happened to you, lie.
Tell them you found peace.
Tell them you found god.
Tell them nothing at all.
Because the truth is this:
You didn’t go looking for answers.
You went looking for an exit.
And you found it.
