Disappear

How to be there one day and not the next.

Walter Briggs wakes up on the morning he plans to disappear.

Not die. Not fake his death. Just quietly leave.

He is sixty three years old. He has worked the same job at the hardware store for thirty seven years. He has eaten oatmeal almost every weekday morning of his adult life. He has been predictable enough that people greet him before he even speaks.

What no one knows is this.

Walter has been practicing how to vanish.

For six months he has been giving things away without announcing it. A hammer to a neighbor. A set of wrenches to a teenager who wanted to fix his first car. He told them he was “clearing clutter.”

He sold his truck and said he wanted something smaller.

He closed his savings account and opened another in a town two states away.

No drama. No note.

He is not running from the law. He is not hiding from danger.

He is running from being known only one way.

At the store, he is dependable Walter.

At church, he is quiet Walter.

In town, he is steady Walter.

But no one remembers that at nineteen he wanted to be a landscape painter. No one knows he still sketches trees on scrap receipt paper during lunch breaks.

He once showed his wife a painting. She had laughed kindly and said, “That’s sweet.” Then life happened. Kids. Bills. Responsibility.

She died eight years ago.

After the funeral, people told him he was strong.

He hated that word.

Strong meant silent.

So this morning, Walter loads two suitcases into a rented car. He leaves the house clean. Keys on the counter. No explanation.

He drives.

Eight hours later, he reaches a coastal town where nobody recognizes him. He rents a small apartment above a bakery. The walls smell like sugar and yeast.

The first morning there, he walks into an art supply store. His hands shake when he buys real canvases. Real brushes. Paint that costs more than a week of groceries used to.

He does not tell anyone he is “starting over.”

He simply begins.

Weeks pass.

Then months.

His first paintings are stiff. Careful. Afraid.

But something shifts the day he stops trying to be good.

He paints the marsh behind the apartment in thick, reckless strokes. Muddy greens. Ugly browns. A sky that looks bruised.

It is not pretty.

It is honest.

A woman from the bakery comes upstairs one evening and sees it drying against the wall. She stares at it for a long time.

“It feels like something,” she says.

Walter almost cries at that sentence.

Not because she praised it.

Because she felt it.

Two years later, a small gallery downtown hangs five of his pieces. They do not sell out. He does not become famous. No miracle headlines.

But his name is printed beneath each one.

Walter Briggs.

Not dependable.

Not quiet.

Not strong.

Just Walter.

One night, sitting in his apartment, he realizes something strange.

He did not disappear.

He arrived.