You went missing for seven months.
5,040 hours without your voice, strength, smile.
How do you lose someone for 210 days
and find out forty years later?
I plotted it using old Ziggy© Day books and didn't
sleep for a week
wondering where you went - a living ghost,
an unfound phantom haunting me before
death allowed.
Disbelieving, I searched my memory –
found nothing but off-the-air static.
My recall shuffled like a magician’s deck of cards -
everything a blur.
I searched for you in dreams where I found you
once before
and silence rebounded.
Did you quit those 210 days?
Lock yourself away because you learned something
you didn’t want known?
And yet I knew.
The pea-sized menace was churning through you
like a chainsaw, carving you piece by piece.
You became a shadow instead of a flare.
And I know, I know, I know, I know
that I can run on this hamster wheel
forty years more and find nothing.
The old date books have no answers,
old friends cannot remember.
That’s where the time gap ends - severs,
gone like time tends to do, leaving no resolution or rest.
Tragic twist delivered that I lost you –
before death, itself, rose and took you too.

© Laura DeHart Young