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MidReal Story
harry
Anonymous
May 8
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There was nothing unusual about that evening.
A regular winter’s night in London, with rain and wind pelting against the window of our favorite pub and the usual crowd gathered in the corner, laughing and sharing stories.
He was his usual self: witty, charming, and obnoxious.
I was my usual self: quiet, analytical, and determined.
We shared a couple of drinks, a few jokes, and a lot of silence while we both sat there at the table, working on our respective books.
It was a typical evening for us, one we’d repeated countless times over the years.
We said goodbye, he left, and I assumed we’d see each other in a few days.
I never saw him again.
The first indication that something was wrong was when I got back to my flat and found a note on the door.
It was from him.
I’d come to expect notes from him by then.
He liked writing things down.
He said it was because he had too many thoughts swirling around in his head all the time and writing them down helped him focus.
He’d write notes on scraps of paper, napkins, even his hand.
The note simply said: “Goodbye.”
I assumed he was leaving for a while.
People need breaks sometimes, to get away from their everyday lives and find some peace and quiet.
And I knew he had a lot of stuff going on in his life that he needed to take care of.
So I didn’t think much of it at the time.
But then I called him and he didn’t answer.
And I texted him and he didn’t reply.
And I went to his flat, but no one answered when I knocked on the door.
His flat was empty, but that didn’t really surprise me either.
It didn’t have much furniture to begin with and most of his stuff was already packed up in boxes.
He’d been planning on moving for a while then, so I assumed he’d finally found a new place to live and moved out.
But then his phone was disconnected and his email was shut down and I started to worry about him more than ever before.
The police were the ones who told me he’d disappeared.
I called them, worried that something had happened to him, and they told me he was officially classified as a missing person.
They couldn’t find him anywhere.
And they were already looking.
They’d been to the last place where he’d said goodbye, the pub where we’d met so many times before.
But no one there knew anything.
No one had seen him since.
His old flat was empty.
The landlord said he’d moved out.
When the police tried to contact him at his new address, they found out that the building was empty too.
No one even knew who lived there before.
Or where they’d gone.
His old editor told me he’d closed his email account too.
And left no forwarding address.
The only person he’d left anything with was me.
The manuscript for his latest book.
A book that was supposed to be our next project together, our first collaboration.
It was the last thing he’d written before he disappeared.
