Effacement Etiquette is a poem about learning how to disappear correctly. It talks about the discipline of self-erasure and how politeness and the desire not to burden others can shape the way we exist. It explores alienation, giving too much of oneself away, the tension between presence and absence, where the line between surviving and vanishing becomes blurred.
I haunt myself.
I move like a shadow misfiled, borrowed from a body that learned how to live without me.
My limbs go first. They perform their world-class routine; walking, touching, responding while something essential lags behind, unnamed.
My motions ask questions I am afraid to answer. Each sigh an infringement. The world is too solid, too insistently alive, and I am thin as my ravished apologies.
The fresh air presses into me. I press back; not out of resistance but merely habit as if pressure alone might teach me where I end.
My tongue knows only silence. Words fracture as they take a trip down the palate, they collapse into themselves, drop into their soft grave, no one will notice.
I am awkward to the bone. My anomalous heartbeat stutters, a shameful disturbing tapping for space it has not earned.
Death terrifies me because I am unfinished. Because what if the end comes before I arrive?
Nightly, my heart rehearses its extinction, terrified of stopping, terrified of continuing.
I hand myself over in careful portions, afraid to want, afraid to take, afraid that occupying space will fracture the fragile architecture of everyone else.
So I become smaller. I shut it. Absence outdoes presence.
I sneak remnants everywhere; in conversations I soften, in apologies I do not owe.
Yet, I cannot tell what was taken from me and what I surrendered to feel harmless, to feel kind.
Selfishness, I despise it. I have seen what unecessary hunger does; it rots our air, when you're hungry I can barely breathe.
So I starve politely, I don't want you to suffocate because of me... call it restraint, call it kindness, I name it reciprocity.
I feel ghost-like not because I have perished but because I never learned how to breathe with noise.
My life continues without any consent. Moments pass through me like needle through skin, getting a new tattoo, " ".
I nod, and smile, and perform the correct amount of ''alive''.
Sometimes I try to gather myself; press my palms into my chest, listen for something solid; all I find is constant buzzing echo. A house emptied so gently no one noticed it was looted.
If I disappear, It will be a gradual thinning, a self divided until nothing remains but courtesy and my unmarked grave.
Still, I am here. Still, this thing breathes.
Even ghosts, I've learned, are capable of humanly longing.
Maybe this fear I feel, this ache, my refusal to vanish cleanly, maybe it is proof that somewhere deep, beneath the cursive blabber,
