I wrote about the Christmas table.
I wrote about the cake on Michael’s porch.
I wrote about the hospital intake form with emergency contacts who had become decorative.
I wrote about how it felt to realize I could die in that house and my children might learn about it from paperwork.
Then I sealed the letters and gave them to my lawyer.
He asked if I was sure.
I said yes.
In March, I vanished.
That is the word my children used later, as if I had been taken.
I was not taken.
I left.
I packed only what belonged to me.
Richard’s photograph.
My jewelry.
My medical records.
A suitcase of clothes.
A box of recipe cards.
The green velvet dress, folded carefully under tissue paper.
I moved into a small apartment in a quiet town they did not know to search.
I bought two mugs, one blue towel, a new kettle, and a notebook.
On the first morning there, I made coffee and drank it by the window.
No one called.
That was fine.
By then, silence had stopped being a wound and become weather.
When my children finally came looking for me, it was not because they missed their mother.
