The Vanishing of Brandyn Taylor

Brandyn

I was seven when I first met him, Brandyn Taylor. He was to become my life long, (almost) best friend. His disappearance, when I was thirty four, shocked me to my core. Overnight he had just vanished without a trace, and after a time I became convinced his body was going to turn up somewhere. over the years I had come to depend on him in a lot of ways.
But let me go back to our younger days before I tell you the story of his disappearance.

Brandyn was everything I ever wanted in a friend; funny, witty, caring, and he swapped sandwiches with me when our mothers gave us something we didn't like. (Which was often.) Sometimes we even swapped our entire lunch box contents, which when you're just seven means a lot.
Things were great in our younger years, we played all the same games, chased each other round the playground at school and went to the park together after school, we read the same books and watched the same cartoons. Life was easy then, it was fun and uncomplicated.
That changed as we got older though, it became harder and harder to spend time with Brandyn, and we were starting to grow apart, like so many friends do as they get older. Whenever I did see him he was always really good to me. We would chat for hours on end, but then he would go again, and it might be weeks until I would see him once more. Of course, it almost goes without saying, that I thought he was really cute. Not that young men like to be called cute, (I think handsome is a more manly word.) He was down right sexy, attractive, you could even say he was mesmerising. I could be sitting anywhere when thoughts of him would pop into my head, and I could picture his deep, ocean blue eyes. (If the eyes are a window into the soul, then his was deep and reflective.) I could sink into his eyes and see a million different things. When I thought about him I could even smell the aftershave he wore, a deep, musty smell, with just a hint of something almost floral. It suited him perfectly, it was an enigma just like he himself was.

College approached and we grew even farther apart. I rarely got to see him at all now. I missed him, a lot. It was as if a piece of me had been cut away, and a gaping hole left when the wound was sewn back up. I felt deflated. I felt as if, without him, I wasn't even the same me anymore, and that was hard to come to terms with. We had been so close for so long, and now, here we were almost like strangers to each other.
I think it hurt even more because I had envisioned us always being together. I told myself I was going to marry Brandyn one day, we would live in a not-too-flashy home, with a nice garden, and have maybe a couple of kids and a pet dog, who we would call Plato. But now my dreams of a happy life, with him, were falling apart. Life was tearing huge chunks of my dreams away from me, and sending them hurtling to the ground, where they would break up into a million tiny pieces, like crumbs from a cake that's been smashed into the floor. That's what it was, my life was a cake slowly being crushed into nothing but crumbs. Talk about dashing young love, crushing the ideals of youth. How could I ever hope to marry a guy that was constantly growing further and further away from me? Sometimes I even wondered if he so much as liked me anymore, we went that long without seeing each other. It hurt at times, and when it hurt it really hurt. I would sit up in my room, at my parents house, alone. I would realise just how lonely and sad I was without him, and sometimes I would no longer hold back my tears, but let them fall freely. Each tear representing another part of my dreams being lost from within me.

Whoever said love was easy is wrong, very wrong. It's not easy, not even slightly easy. It's pain and heartache, sleepless nights and seemingly endless days of misery. It crushes your chest so hard that you fear your heart is going to be obliterated, sucked from your body while it still beats, and discarded like a piece of trash. That was my experience of love, so far, anyway. I felt as though I could only ever see him from afar now, like looking down the wrong end of a periscope, and he was out of reach. Always out of reach. At least, he was always out of my reach.

What we want in life changes as we grow up though, as we get older we want different things. People change too. We were definitely growing apart, and the more I thought about it the more I was certain his feelings for me had changed. If they hadn't changed, if he did still love me the way he used to, then why was he growing so far apart from me? There could be no other reason for it. I'm not sure what hurt the most, knowing he no longer loved me, or not seeing him for so long at a time. I felt as if every single cell in my body was craving him. Yearning, that's what it was, i was yearning for him. (Yearning is such an odd word in itself isn't it?) I craved him, to feel his energy bouncing off mine, to lay in the grass, his arms around me, while we looked for shapes in the clouds, like we had used to when we were younger.