Conundrum
581 Words
I drop my backpack off on the floor then exhaustingly slump myself into the velvet couch, slowly massaging my forehead. I glance at my wrist watch that says 23:11. It has been five days, 23 hours and 15 minutes since she was gone.
The news about her disappearance is slowly drifting off. No more vans of media outside my apartment to wait for me with flashing cameras, different recorders and silly microphones. New York is now obsessed with a different set of news. Suddenly, I feel as though she's really gone-forever.
The picture of her last smile during dinner before she left—or abducted—I'm not sure which is which-is still pasted inside my head. I know it's going to be my instant little torture until I finally get to find her.
My thoughts carried me to our last conversation...
"Sometimes, I wonder," she started in the middle of our let's-settle-with-pizza dinner, "if one day...y'know, out of the blue, I'd be gone forever. After a couple of years, or a decade, would people still tell the story of how I disappeared?"
That was the strangest question my best friend-Heather; the daughter of one of the best performer in Broadway have ever asked. She's never predictable. I have lived through those moments where she would ask or simply voice out her random thoughts, but that was the only question that gave me chills.
"The fact that you're a daughter of the great Heather Nathalie Whites? I'm sure, if you ever disappear, New York will phenomenally be thrilled that they'd probably sculpt a statue on your behalf. That is if they won't find you. But seriously, what's with that weird thought?" I don't even know why I answered that question in the first place.
She shrugged. "Well, Esther. I just came to realize that sometimes; being lost means being found, not existing means existing and being invisible means being visible," she said nonchalantly. I can't even believe she could say those deep lines in a very calm way.
"Stop, Heath, you are seriously creeping the s**t out of me."
She chuckled on my response.
That was June 03, 1983. I woke up at 7:00 in the morning on June 04 and she was gone—up until now.
I wave the flashbacks away and stand up on the couch feeling famish. I reheat the untouched pizza from 7/11, feed my stomach up with a slice, a can of diet coke and decided to sleep the gloomy night away. Tomorrow is another day, another day of wonders and possibilities of finding my eighteen-year-old best friend.
• • •
A dream about her woke me up; she was sitting inside my apartment, smiling at me with such content in her eyes that I have never seen for seven years of being her best friend.
I check the clock on my bedside table, 6:59 in the morning. I roll over to get my weak body up, gargle some mouthwash and thought of where to again, start searching.
I'm about to get out of my room when I notice a folded paper on the floor. Feeling my forehead furrow, I pick it up and what's written on it almost give me a heart attack.
"Dear Best Friend,
I'm so sorry for the bother. I'd tell you to stop searching for me but I know your stubborn little cerebellum won't listen, just like my parents'.
I love you but I don't want you guys to find me. . .yet.
Strangely,
Heather."
END.
- Writer
