I haven’t had any information. It’s been nearly 8 years

I haven’t had any information. It’s been nearly 8 years. at the beginning, I had excessive hopes. I couldn’t imagine that she’d disappeared for all time. She might come returned. someday, i might listen her voice in the stairwell, and she or he’d are available and say, What a story, if I’d regarded, i would’ve stayed in bed this morning. i have imagined eachpossible scenario. Regina went downstairs to shop for next to nothing, leeks, a pound of turnips, a few carrots, somespring onions, all a matter of twenty mins or so, however then she stopped through a café on her way domestic.

She stayed for lunch due to the fact she bumped into a friend there, she lingers because it turns out that that is a youthbuddy, a lady from returned home: “In those days, we had been inseparable, like sisters, I don’t even bear in mind how we lost music of every other.” Regina felt dizzy, she turned into taken to the sanatorium, not from the café at the nook, wherein everybody knows her, however from a few area farther away, past the community, some region where she’d in no way ventured earlier than, and she or he didn’t have her papers on her, and no one knew her there, in that café. She become transported to the hospital, subconscious, she is alone in a room with white walls, unknown, unknowable, unrecognizable, nobody to say, “That’s Regina, we have to call her loved ones and let them recognize.” no person to dial my variety and me, who’s beginning to comprehend that time is passing. in which is Regina? I’ve scoured every bistro inside the community, in the metropolis, and additionally the hospitals. in which is Regina? long gone to go to the beach? two days by myself in a touch inn on the Norman coast, she wanted to peer Étretat, or the Bay of Somme, but why take off with out caution? If she wanted to be on my own, she may want to have told me, i'd have understood. No, I wouldn’t have understood, i might have stated, “I went with you to Étretat final time, it became with my grandmother years earlier thanshe died.” I wouldn’t have understood if she desired to be on my own, I went with her anywhere, it turned into my visionof couplehood, being collectively, being collectively as lots as possible, making the maximum of life before demiseseparates us, I simply didn’t recognize that she cherished being with me and that she additionally loved being withoutme, that she cherished being, whereas I cherished being along with her. She left with out saying some thing due to the fact she didn’t dare tell me that she wanted to be on my own, that she desired the sea to herself, otherwise the mountains, she used to dream approximately the Mer de Glace, I must hurry to peer it earlier than it melts, it’s already gotten smallerthrough several kilometers, or maybe Pompeii, or Tangier, or Easter Island. I rummaged thru the whole thing in theapartment looking for a visitor map, a credit card receipt, some proof of overseas calls. but there was not anything. I persevered to marvel. whilst might she ought to come again from Pompeii-Tangier-Easter Island? I waited for her. long gone to live somewhere else, long gone with someone else, or a person else once more, gone against her will, arrested, deported, transported, raped, beaten, 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. long past with out leaving a hint or a forwarding cope with. Vanished. no one is aware of where she is. I don’t realize where she is. The earth spread out and swallowed her. Now she’s gambling Captain Nemos under a few bulge inside the earth. She’s a prisoner, she turned intoabducted, she became bound and gagged, she is pressured to do matters she doesn’t want to do and thinks of me. She thinks of all nowadays when we will’t be collectively. She says to herself, “I by no means need to stay without you once more, from now on you’ll include me even to the marketplace.” She daydreams about our unhatched plans for happiness, our now useless lies. She not has all and sundry to deceive. Regina has disappeared. Her clothes are nonetheless here, her books in a language I don’t understand. but why analyze it now? might she have stayed if I’d discovered it? She’s long pastto get back to this language. in case you don’t examine it, it’s because you didn’t really want to live with me.

I’ve looked and searched for Regina. Shouldn’t I maintain on with it, in preference to throwing within the towel after only some years? She desires me to locate her. She’s putting me to the test.

“You don’t love me. You don’t suppose I’m really worth greater than a -yr search. Why did I live with a person goodbyewho didn’t even love me? You haven’t even gone to Easter Island to search for me. i might’ve already made the experience.”

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

“absolutely everyone can be observed.”

“however someone who disappears — they don’t exist.” “otherwise the name of the game marketers have given me a brand new face.”

So she has a new face. She lives next door, beneath a false name. Or maybe Regina wasn’t her actual call to start with. She has reassumed her actual call. It turned into a bizarre name anyway, Regina. It was all incorrect for her. She lives nearby, in the condominium across the way, she observes me, she is amused at my lonely existence. She continues a tally of the those who come up late at night time and don’t cross down till morning.

“I told 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 via my mailbox after I’m out, she listens to my answering system remotely, she connects to my voicemail without my knowing it. She monitors all my comings and goings and notes them down in a magazine. She is constantlylooking me, and i am usually searching out her, anticipating her. She scrutinizes me. She inhabits me. She is right here.