If I vanish in it

then I vanish, and there's nothing left where my body was. I mean there's something left where my body was, but that something isn't me. Every mark is something somewhere. Every mark is left by something. If I could retrace each mark, the world would slowly reassemble in the darkness, getting lighter every lift, healed rift, every movement of a skiff backward on a lake, lightly. A forgetting is a vanishing too, assuaging the traces in the brain until they don't crease the meat at all. All I know is that they can disappear. I pray they can disappear, those selves I used to be, those footprints I made on others' hearts. If they can't disappear can they be covered over, Willard, so at least they're lost to me in time? If we can soothe electricity away, then the singed bit left by it can be taken back too. It's a positive move, to think we can erase ourselves. It enables love, a cove, a covering up of things we did when we were younger, stronger, when our hair was longer, when we believed the world would disappear for us when we closed our eyes. But then after all of that it was somehow still there. In snow, in silence, in that particular silence that snow offers us. It is a chance, Willard. It is a second chance to me, this memory, this offering, this doubleness. Knowing trace makes us trace our knowing. Makes us think back, blackly, makes us wonder if what we did is what made us, or was it what we didn't do? True, is there anything true in memory, or is it all a bit that we can flip in dreams from off to on and back again. Is everything just white on white on black? Where I was I was. I can't take it back.