Recently, I lie awake, tucked into my comfy bed, as the thought of remarkable event in my life was looping through my mind, irritatingly looping and looping, keeping me from sleep.
The very first time I can remember being irreparably changed in the deepest recesses of my soul, happened in college. This was the hour that I found my voice and how loud and often that voice is used to accomplish productive results.
A friend, my best friend, was missing. Not just missing, missing for an entire night. Back in those days this was not the event it is today. In fact the campus police decided without justification that she must have run off to have an abortion. Happens all the time, they said.
Remember, this was my best friend. I knew stuff about her that no one else knew, as she did about me. This would be a huge event, discussion, round table meeting of the besties on what to do and how to handle this development. It would never include disappearing without one of us going with her or knowing about it.
We banded together and posted her photo in every dorm and Fraternity (there were no Sorority houses on our campus) with a plea to contact one of us if she was sighted. We established command central, a friends duplex, we went on the offensive and by that, I mean aggressively went on the offensive. These actions all expressed our collective voice on the matter very loudly.
Quickly this was discouraged and the posters taken down. We were informed that we were creating alarm on campus. Did not want to alarm the campus did we, because tsk tsk, surely she was off doing something she did not want us to know. It was an attempt to silence our voice.
We found her car but not her. We reported all the details to the campus police. They seemingly wrote all the information down and displayed adequate concern.
Later, after I had called the city police and the National Guard (I was serious about this, I tell you), we returned to the campus police. Imagine how disappointed we were when we found no written record was available from our previous visit. Seems they just wanted us to feel like they heard us.
Calls were made to anyone that might have a clue to where she could be. We combed the parking lot where her car was found, for anything, a piece of hair, jewelry, something from her purse. A friend even pried open her car trunk to make sure she was not in there.
Calls were made to her parents and my Mom went to be with them to tell them the news. They had many questions and were in total disbelief and confusion on whom to believe the campus police or the friends that knew their daughter for years and years and had very close relationships with her.
The friend's voices won out, the parents made the police take a real report, the flyer's went back up, the campus was alerted.
Finally after eighteen hours my friend was returned, harmed, irreparably damaged, frightened, forever changed, but alive. She was alive. Many of our worst thoughts and fears had happened, but the worst of all was not. She was alive.
And we were happy and hoped that these events started a change on how college campuses everywhere handled missing students. Maybe our voices would be acknowledged now.
When she was found, she wanted her friends, a cigarette, and a coke. All the things at the time the Diva's did together. It was her comfort, her security blanket, the return to her normalcy that helped get her through.
We never talk about it anymore, but we all know, we all remember, and we were all changed in ways that can never be expressed. And like a whisper in the night, the terror momentarily will haunt me, but quickly passes, and even more quickly as the years pass. And then I wonder how loud and frequent her whisper is and how long it lasts for her.
There is joy in knowing the Amber Alert system is in place, and police take reports seriously, and every time I see a missing person information scroll across the screen I first get a shiver of fear, but know that times have changed for the better when it comes to missing persons, and I thank God for that and I thank God my friend, who is still my friend, and is alive.
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