Left behind

Minutes passed like hours, and the distant wails of sirens grew steadily louder. The flashing lights of an ambulance and a police car sliced through the darkness, casting an eerie, intermittent glow on the scene.

Paramedics swarmed around Kaito, their expressions a blend of concern and determination. They examined his minor injuries and as they did so Kaito slowly opened his eyes. Fortunately, there were no significant injuries.

The paramedics promptly asked questions about the accident. I cooperated as best as I could, my mind still reeling from the surreal events of the evening. I had no thoughts of my own and was just my doing best to answer them. it felt as if my mind had shut down and I felt like a machine only capable of giving the output to the input provided.

One of the paramedics, a compassionate woman with kind eyes, offered me a reassuring smile. "You're lucky to be alive," she said softly. "It's a miracle you made it out of there."

Her words hung in the air, heavy with the unspoken fate of my friend. I nodded, unable to find the right words to convey the depths of my emotions.

'No way..Alex..he is..'

I shut my mind, too scared to think anymore. The police came and took my statement, and I recounted the accident as accurately as I could. They assured me that a search and rescue team would be dispatched to locate Alex and the submerged vehicle. Despite their efforts to provide solace, the minutes dragged on, and a sense of helplessness settled over me, suffocating me.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the rescue team arrived. Clad in drysuits, PFDs* and armed with specialized equipment, they wasted no time in launching a search of the river's depths.

I watched with a mixture of hope and dread as they dove into the frigid waters, their powerful flashlights cutting through the murky darkness below. Every passing second intensified the knot of anxiety in my chest.

'Please, please, find him, find Alex, somehow, anyhow. Please God.'

The rescue attempt went on for hours as their efforts remained steadfast and unyielding. It was a terrifying vigil, lit harshly by floodlights and broken by the whispered murmurs of passersby.

As dawn began to break, the team surfaced, their expressions somber. My heart sank as they approached me, their body language conveying the very thing I dreaded.

"We couldn't locate your friend or the vehicle," one of the divers explained gently. "The river's currents are strong, and the water is too murky for us to continue safely. Because of the relentless rainfall this year, there's a danger of the river flooding as well."

'Haa...what is he even saying, is he going to give up searching for Alex? He better not.'

Despair threatened to engulf me, yet I clung to the faintest glimmer of hope. "But you'll keep searching, won't you? He can't just be gone."

The rescue team leader nodded sympathetically. "We'll do everything we can. We'll bring in more equipment and divers, but I won't make false promises. It's a challenging situation, and time is against us."

I nodded, tears welling up once again. The weight of the unknown bore down on me like a crushing force. I felt a profound sense of loss. In my grief, I wanted to lash out, to point out their incompetence, to accuse them of not doing their job properly.

'It must be so easy for them, I thought bitterly. Because of the Vanishing, they can just do a half-assed job and return empty-handed, and no one would question them. The world would only consider it another case of Vanishing. How many lives had been uprooted because of this collective apathy? How many of those who had vanished were actually victims of the Vanishing?'

I was unable to get rid of the bitterness that had grown inside of me. It was a harsh self-reflection, a confrontation with my own passivity. I knew that I, too, had been part of the problem. Like so many others, I had turned a blind eye to the suffering of those affected by the Vanishing. As long as it didn't directly concern me, I had chosen to look the other way. Like the others, I simply did not care enough.

The police offered to drive me to a nearby hospital for a thorough examination and to provide a safe space while the search efforts continued. Reluctantly, I agreed, realizing that I needed to regain my strength both physically and emotionally.

The hospital's sterile surroundings and the clinical efficiency of the medical staff stood in stark contrast to the chaos and uncertainty of the previous night. I underwent a series of tests and examinations. This incident reminded me of the fragility of life. The life I had taken for granted all this time felt too precious now.

My injuries, though minor, were treated with care, and I was given a clean bill of health. However, physical well-being alone wouldn't be able to fix the holes in my heart or put an end to the nagging worries that gnawed at the back of my mind.

Days turned into weeks, and the search for Alex yielded no results. The river held onto its secrets, refusing to surrender any signs of my friend or the car.

The authorities and search teams gradually scaled back their efforts, their resources stretched thin by the newer Vanishing incidents that occurred. The mystery that had initially captured my attention, the enigma that felt interesting before, now felt like a cruel joke. A cruel prank that had stolen someone I held dear.

I returned to the empty room of my family home. Alex's disappearance remained an unfathomable void in my life, a question without an answer, a wound that refused to heal.

'yeah, it's not the same anymore, nothing's the same anymore. I knew there was a chance we could have gradually torn apart when I would start going to college, but..this..this is too sudden. Just where did you go?'

Weeks turned into months, and I became consumed by a relentless obsession. I scoured news articles and even delved into fringe theories, all in a desperate attempt to uncover the truth behind the Vanishing phenomenon and to keep my mind occupied. It was an obsession driven not just by a thirst for knowledge but by a burning need to find closure, to bring Alex back from where he had vanished.

'So selfish, even all of this I did not do for Alex, I know there is no way to bring him back, yet I did all this not for him but for my own closure.'

'It's all my fault, if I had just taken a taxi as my parents told me. If I had not asked for you to drop me...If you had made a better friend than me.'

----

One fateful evening, as I sat in my dimly lit room, surrounded by the scattered remnants of my research, a sense of resignation washed over me. The world had moved on, as it always did, leaving behind the memories and mysteries of the past.

I leaned back in my chair, exhaustion weighing down my eyelids. My computer screen displayed an array of articles, photographs, and maps, all interconnected by digital threads of information. I made every attempt to solve the mystery that had grasped my life, but I was still no closer.

'Right, nobody cares anymore.'

Just then the room seemed to blur, and I felt a strange, disorienting sensation. It was as though reality had grown thin, and I was teetering on the precipice of something inexplicable.

In that surreal moment,

I tried to stand, to make sense of the chaos that engulfed me, and also partly out of instinct, but my limbs felt like lead, they did not respond to my will. Panic surged through me as I realized that I was no longer in control of my own body.

My vision blurred, and I heard a distant, echoing voice—an echo of my own thoughts, or perhaps something else entirely. It whispered of worlds beyond worlds, of dimensions interwoven like threads in a cosmic tapestry. At that moment, a thought struck me like a lightning bolt, the Vanishing - It was a peek into the depths of existence, a reminder that reality was a fragile illusion. It wasn't just Alex who had vanished; the very fabric of reality had been unraveling like an old cloth pulled too hard and haphazardly sewn back together. The Vanishing was not an isolated phenomenon but a symptom of an unfathomable cosmic anomaly. Something was wrong with the world.

I felt myself being sucked inexorably into the whirling abyss as the room broke up into pieces of reality. My body fell apart, and I was reduced to a mere apparition. As I vanished into nothingness, I realized that I had become part of the enigma and was now a piece of the puzzle that would never be finished.

'Ah Karma, that bitch. But... I deserve this. Do with me as you wish. I don't want to suffer in solitude any longer.'

The room, the articles, the memories—all dissolved into nothingness, and reappeared as if nothing ever happened. The world kept moving as it always did, the people living in it blind to the riddles that remained in the shadows, and the world ready to claim anyone who dared to look for answers.

And so, I became another entry in the ever-expanding catalog of the Vanished, another soul lost to the enigma that was the 'Vanishing'.

PFD = personal flotation device