Will I never see you again? The thought made me want to die. I thought for sure these feelings would ease with time, but they haven’t. I felt the loss of her now as keenly as I had in the beginning.
Mom’s voice intruded on my thoughts and pulled me back to the here and now. “I don’t want you to worry about a thing son. You’ll come home with us and I’ll have you back on your feet in no time.”
What? Was I that bad? I tried to rack my brain, to make sense of what was going on. What was I doing before I got sick? And what kind of sickness is it that the doctors don’t already know?
I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary that day and I wasn’t exposed to any sort of bug that I know of. If they couldn’t find any reason for this sudden illness I don’t know what it could be.
I took stock of my body and though I was weak and my mouth tasted like sawdust, my heart no longer felt like it would burst out of my chest and I was no longer suffering from the shakes.
I was just tired and beat. Nothing I haven’t felt before. “No mom that’s okay. I need to be home….” I almost said in case she comes back but that didn’t make any sense and would only open the door to more questions than I was willing to answer.
It had been a while since I thought like that. That I’d come home one day and find her puttering around in the kitchen the way she used to before everything went to shit. I’m not sure if this renewed hope is a blessing or a curse.
She’s been gone too long for me to still believe in that pipe dream. I’d long given up hope of that ever happening, but I’d never stopped wishing all the same. Not really.
I still find myself searching for her face in the crowd. Whenever I travel out of town I get a new sense of anticipation, thinking that maybe this time I’d find her.
I’ve imagined our reunion a million times in a million ways. But will it ever be? Will I ever hold her in my arms again? Will I ever feel the warmth of her body next to mine?
Had I really done everything I could, or was there something I’d missed? The police had no clues, no one had seen or heard a thing in two years.
A human being had just simply disappeared off the face of the earth. And though I told myself in the beginning that she would walk through the door any day. As time went on even I stopped believing that.
The cops kept telling me that she’d pulled a runner, but I knew it wasn’t true. She would never have left me, not for any reason.
If there was one thing I was sure of it was our love for each other. I knew her inside and out, knew that when she looked up at me with those big blue eyes, that the love I saw there was real.
I refused to listen to anyone who tried selling me on the idea that my woman had found someone else and ran off. Just the thought of such a thing had made me murderous in the beginning, until I’d stopped cooperating with the cops.
I had no explanation for her sudden disappearance but I knew what we had, was real. But in the end that hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t been enough to keep her safe, to keep her at my side for the rest of her life like she’d promised.
Every day since she’s been gone I’ve fought an internal battle. Trying to hang on to the truth, as I knew it. The truth that she would never leave me on her own accord, and the reality that she was gone. My worst fear, and the thing I fought most was the idea that she was dead.
Though I know in my soul that I would sense it if her life force had ended, there were times when I couldn’t escape reality. And with everyone else already surmising the worse, it had become harder and harder to hold on.
But I have and I will. I will never give up hope that one day I will see her again. It’s the reason I’m still here. The reason I haven’t put a gun to my head and ended it all when the pain became too much to bear.
Where are you Zandi? Give me a sign, something, anything, and I’ll come and get you. I smiled to myself as I realized I still had this much hope in our connection.
Still believed that if my baby really were alive out there, somewhere, that she’d find her way back to me. It’s something I never gave up hope on. Something I’ve been dreaming of for two years.