I haven’t had any information. It’s been nearly eight years

I haven’t had any information. It’s been nearly eight years. at first, I had excessive hopes. I couldn’t imagine that she’d disappeared all the time. She might come returned. one day, i'd listen her voice within the stairwell, and he or she’d are available and say, What a story, if I’d acknowledged, i might’ve stayed in mattress this morning.

i have imagined everyfeasible scenario. Regina went downstairs to buy subsequent to not anything, leeks, a pound of turnips, a few carrots, a few spring onions, all a be counted of twenty mins or so, but then she stopped by means of a café on her manner home. She stayed for lunch due to the fact she bumped into a friend there, she lingers as it turns out that that is a early life pal, a female from back home: “In those days, we had been inseparable, like sisters, I don’t even recollect how we misplacedtrack of each other.” Regina felt dizzy, she turned into taken to the health center, now not from the café on the corner, wherein anybody knows her, but from some vicinity farther away, past the neighborhood, some location wherein she’d never ventured before, and she didn’t have her papers on her, and no person knew her there, in that café. She turned intotransported to the health facility, unconscious, she is by myself in a room with white partitions, unknown, unknowable, unrecognizable, no one to say, “That’s Regina, we ought to name her loved ones and let them understand.” no one to dial my quantity and me, who’s starting to recognise that point is passing.

in which is Regina? I’ve scoured each bistro in theneighborhood, inside the metropolis, and additionally the hospitals. in which is Regina? long past to go to the seashore? two days alone in a touch resort at the Norman coast, she desired to peer Étretat, or the Bay of Somme, however why take off without caution? If she desired to be by myself, she may want to have told me, i might have understood. No, I wouldn’t have understood, i might have said, “I went with you to Étretat last time, it changed into with my grandmother years before she died.” I wouldn’t have understood if she wanted to be alone, I went with her everywhere, it became my visionof couplehood, being collectively, being collectively as a great deal as feasible, making the most of existence earlier thandemise separates us, I simply didn’t realise that she cherished being with me and that she also loved being with out me, that she cherished being, while I loved being along with her. 

She left with out announcing anything because she didn’t dare inform me that she wanted to be on my own, that she desired the ocean to herself, otherwise the mountains, she used to dream about the Mer de Glace, I ought to hurry to look it earlier than it melts, it’s already reduced in size by usingnumerous kilometers, or maybe Pompeii, or Tangier, or Easter Island. I rummaged thru the whole thing in the apartmentseeking out a vacationer map, a credit score card receipt, some proof of foreign calls. but there has been not anything. I endured to marvel. whilst could she have to come lower back from Pompeii-Tangier-Easter Island? I waited for her. long gone to live some place else, long gone with a person else, or someone else again, gone in opposition to her will, arrested, deported, transported, raped, crushed, tortured, killed. Killed? Who might kill Regina? What for? And the purchasing bag? The leeks? The turnips? No hint of turnips. No buying bag, no cardigan, no DNA. gone without leaving a trace or a forwarding deal with. Vanished. nobody is aware of where she is. I don’t recognise in which she is. The earth opened upand swallowed her. Now she’s playing Captain Nemos below some bulge in the earth. She’s a prisoner, she turned intokidnapped, she turned into bound and gagged, she is pressured to do matters she doesn’t need to do and thinks of me. She thinks of all in recent times while we will’t be together. She says to herself, “I in no way need to live with out you once more, any further you’ll include me even to the market.” She daydreams approximately our unhatched plans for happiness, our now vain lies. She not has anybody to mislead. Regina has disappeared. Her garments are neverthelessright here, her books in a language I don’t apprehend. but why analyze it now? could she have stayed if I’d found out it? She’s long past to get returned to this language. in case you don’t examine it, it’s due to the fact you didn’t really want to live with me.

I’ve seemed and looked for Regina. Shouldn’t I hold on with it, rather than throwing in the towel after only some years? She desires me to locate her. She’s placing me to the test.

“You don’t love me. You don’t assume I’m worth more than a two-year seek. Why did I live with a man see you later who didn’t even love me? You haven’t even gone to Easter Island to look for me. i'd’ve already made the trip.”

“however how do I know in which to look? Who says you’re on Easter Island? Why not Samarkand, Zanzibar, Tamanrasset…?”

“anybody may be determined.”



“but a person who disappears — they don’t exist.” “or else the secret dealers have given me a new face.”

So she has a new face. She lives round the corner, under a fake call. Or maybe Regina wasn’t her actual name to start with. She has reassumed her actual call. It changed into a weird call besides, Regina. It turned into all wrong for her. She lives close by, in the apartment across the way, she observes me, she is amused at my lonely life. She keeps a tally of the those who arise past due at night and don’t pass down till morning.

“I informed you,” she says, “you don’t love me.”

I’m her amusement. She knows the entirety approximately my existence. She makes use of the door code to get in and rummage through my mailbox when I’m out, she listens to my answering system remotely, she connects to my voicemail without my understanding it. She monitors all my comings and goings and notes them down in a magazine. She is usuallywatching me, and i'm usually looking for her, looking ahead to her. She scrutinizes me. She inhabits me. She is right here.