My skin will turn to dust, and my personhood will conflate with humanity's cemetery. My voice may echo in the hall of poetry—recorded in stolen verses, borrowed phrases, and recovered prose. This is where you will find me after all these years: the girl you left behind and the notes of you she wrote in the margins of her mind. Build your empires of concrete and steel to be preserved in the fragile pages of a history book. Carve your imprint into the earth though it will erode by morn. Nothing here lasts; impermanence claims all.

I am beginning to seek refuge in grains of sand forged by brutality and blown by the wind, this one place of stillness where mountain summits and ravines meet in quiet, where the stars gather in reflection of their abundance and the sky becomes an ocean, lapping in deep blue depths above. Lose me in the number of insurmountable tomorrows. Find me in your blood and the void that rests behind your eyes. I will live and I will expand. I will burst into flames in search of love and growth. My spine will bend and my shoulders will hunch, body aching to be absorbed by the earth. Like a dying star, I will collapse into myself, yet create innumerable births from this demise. I am not immortal, yet I will never die.

I will whisper through the mirage of time, dance in distant voids, and discover hidden shrines. I will see mystery and reality and everything in between. Absolute understanding eludes us by design. We exist to gather pieces of other souls to construct our own, to collect moments and forge the worlds we inhabit. We are meant to let the glass shatter and be picked up at the shore, dulled and made blunt until unrecognisable in a sea of similarity—like hands reaching towards the heavens, longing to know their sight, joining the collective design, yet desiring their former individuality.

The person you want is reinvented by sundown, swimming in dreams and secrets and ephemeral bliss. My name will be foreign to your tongue, but I will flicker in your memory. The dirt will remember I once stood on it; petrified forests will remember I frolicked in their woods. I will exist in paradox—present in absence, nothing in the guise of everything. I will find peace and I will be free. I will learn this life is not the simplicity that it has always seemed.