Dear Harmony

[22]

Dear Harmony,

   I left town. To look for you, because everyone else has given up. They say if you don't want to be found, you never will be. I guess what they're implying is that they think you don't want to be found. But what if you do? What if you have been kidnapped by a gang and silenced so nobody knows you were abducted?

   Maybe aliens are real and you got beamed up. That would be cool. If you ever meet The Doctor, please tell him hi for me. I'd feel better knowing you were a companion of a Time Lord, but I still would want to come along. It isn't right for my other half to go off galavanting to space while I remain on earth, writing letters to you and leaving them under your pillow as if some magic fairy is going to materialize you.

   Can't you see what you've done? I am slowly going insane. It hurts to know nobody wants to look for you anymore. What has this world come to? We make half-assed attempts to search for someone—and unenthusiastically at that—then give up altogether, claiming the missing person must not want to be found. What happened to a world where everybody would drop everything, no matter how important, to search for a missing child?

   Even the news has ceased to talk about you. They've grown bored. Everybody has grown bored.

   I hope you appreciate my enthusiasm and lack of boredom. Frankly, searching for you has been far from boring. Instead it's been mentally abusive, physically taxing, spiritually painful. I hope one day you understand and feel remorse for all the trouble you've caused, if this was voluntary.

   For all I know, you could be chained in some dark pit, your head shaved, while you're forced to make root beer in the toilet. You could be someone's slave. You could have been murdered in Venice.

   I don't know. But I want to. That's why I left town.

   I am coming for you, wherever you are. This will be just like our childhood games of hide-and-seek.

   Only bigger.