Missing

But see, if you were lucky enough to have been missing for more than three months, you could feel really lucky because then you would get the whole, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON? ANYONE WITH INFORMATION, DIAL THIS NUMBER deal.
And that would be followed by a toll free number, which was usually only monitored by a recorded message machine anyway.
So, in all honesty, by the time you finally got your face on the carton, you were either already found or lying dead in a dumpster somewhere.
I mean, who is ever found alive after three months?
I thought the whole system was pretty lousy myself, as if they weren’t giving any of the missing people a hope in hell of being found, but hey, who cared what some kid thought?
And it always amazed me, whoever saw those missing people anyway?
In all the years I had been drinking milk and staring at the faces on the back, I had never seen one.
Not one.
And I had travelled extensively.
But anyway, that is getting off the track of the story.
So there I was, one morning, just about to go to school, finishing my breakfast in the lonely house as the rest of my family had left before me, when I picked up the milk carton and distractedly flipped it round to view today’s lost soul.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON? The headline screamed out as usual.
‘No.’ I muttered to myself, ‘I never see these people. Whoever does?’
But I glanced at the photo anyway.
And found myself staring at my own image printed on the back of a milk carton.
At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me.
After all, I wasn’t missing.
But the more I stared at the picture, the more it was me, and the more I begun to doubt whether maybe I was missing.
A million thoughts ran through my head as I stared at me on the back of the milk carton.
Maybe it was all just a joke, it wasn’t April Fool’s Day but maybe my family had stuck the picture on just to fool me.
I tried to peel it off; thinking the real missing person was hiding underneath.
But it wouldn’t come off.
It wasn’t merely stuck on.
It was real.

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