A Day and a Half After Perfection

The night is buzzing. My half-sleeping brain tries to weigh whether this is worthy of alerting the rest of me.  

                 For me, everything starts buzzing when the sun sets. Always. First, my brain begins-and it refuses to be quieted, like that annoying kid who won’t stay in bed and instead bounces on it screaming. For the entire night. My closet light literally buzzes, and it constantly sounds like a weak bug zapper. I’m forced to sleep with it on to ward off the monsters that live in my closet, and to appease my screeching-hyperactive-child brain. My ceiling fan’s job is to cover up the other noises with it’s own more comforting hum. So on any given night my room is pretty lively.

               Tonight there is a different kind of commotion though. As I’m pulling myself away from my dream I wonder if the monsters found an antidote for light and are now moving back into my closet.

How long have I been awake?

In my downstairs, people are scurrying in a badly choreographed dance, carrying flashlights and worries, murmuring in panic.

“An hour, you said, since you discovered?”

“Two.”
“Could it be...kidnaping?” the last word is breathed.

“Do you think?” Another overly excited woman.

The room is thick with rumors, wild theories and sweat.


Jessa is gone.

I knew it would happen someday. It had just been a gamble of whether she’d snap or be old enough to move out first. I always used to ask her why she stayed here when she hated it so much, and she said she always had something left to loose. She’d stay until that one last thing was gone.

My parents head past me towards the door and other assorted neighbors scuffle for the abandoned space. Jessa’s dad is directing traffic in the whole mess.

Jessa’s dad. I eye him with a glazed glare. Even now, barely awake, I’m sure he’s the reason for all this. The search parties busy being “organized” don’t need to waste time looking for a kidnapper or some such nonsense. When our fathers are supposed to be our model for God, relationships, and everything else in life, how did anyone expect Jessa to turn out?

But you couldn’t hope to explain that to the zealous midnight neighborhood meeting in my living room.

Someone notices me and I become the lightening rod for the collective nervous energy. When did I last see her? They demand. Did she mention anything? Had she gotten mixed up in the “wrong crowd”? Drugs, maybe??

Even their questions climb all over each other.

You know those promises you make to yourself to never become your (insert here: mother/father/some other dreaded relative)?  Jessa and I randomly make those to each other. Yesterday it was that we’ll never marry uptight people and that we will get bad grades in college. We made the second because we’re sick of being slaves to stress and homework. The first, well, people like these are why.

Then my savior stands in front of me, six feet tall. Sometimes all you need is one person who actually knows you. Mark pulls me to my unsteady feet and puts a tacky yellow flashlight in one of my hands. In the other, his own.

“Come on,” he leads me, “we gotta go look for her.”

Finally someone useful in this place.

I had the feeling tonight was going to become the kind of dream the concert had been, where the hangover lasts for days.


The world didn’t exist tonight; it was all cardboard cut outs on the set of an amateur play. The neighborhoods were too still and perfect to be real.

We parked on the school's grass.

                If she was still anywhere in the area, Mark reasoned, she’d be here. Too many three a.m.’s had seen Jessa wishing on stars on this playground, stealing time from the night.

We walked to each corner of our childhood kickball fields. We softly sang her name and only faintly hoped to hear her echo. I knew that Mark, like nearly everyone else awake at this insane hour was chasing not as much Jessa, but the illusion he could ride up on a white horse and save her from the torture of her captors. They didn’t know she was already saved. I just had to figure out where before anyone else did. The adults had quite a head start, though, as I was still waiting for reality to slap my mind awake so I could make some sense of tonight.

We ended at the swings, with no Jessa and not much surprise.

Mark sat on the “sixth grader” swings, the ones that used to make you cool. Swinging is incredible therapy. When I’d let my stress air out some, we were dangling and kicking the bark dust, and I could see shadows of us in the way we used to sit; Jeremy on the far left, Jessa next to him, then me, then Chris...

Mark leaned over and kissed me.  Not the way he used to, but a kiss that brought back my freckles and the smell of damp bark dust on the first sunny day after rainstorms.

In Tokyo or Ireland bombs were probably going off.

On the streets of New York, someone was being mugged or murdered, maybe both.

A seventeen year old girl was missing in the dead of night.

But here in this park there were just two teenagers, kissing memories on the playground they’ve outgrown.

After that one chopped moment the frenzied world began swirling once more.

Mark and I had been “married” once, according to the swinging ritual.  In those days, as we swung we’d shout out our swinging superstitions, and the latest marriage news, and Chris was always chanting the Robert Luis Stevenson poem...

I stopped.

Chris.

And I knew where she was.