There’s No Place Like Here

2

My life has been made up of a great many ironies; my going missing only added to an already very long list.

First, I’m six foot one. Ever since I was a child I’ve been towering over just about everyone. I could never get lost in a shopping center like other kids, I could never hide properly when playing games, I was never asked to dance at discos, I was the only teenager that wasn’t aching to buy her first pair of high heels. Jenny-May Butler’s favorite name for me, well, certainly one of her top ten, was “Daddy-longlegs,” which she liked to call me in front of large crowds of her friends and admirers. Believe me, I’ve heard them all. I was the kind of person you could see coming from a mile away. I was the awkward dancer on the dance floor, the girl at the cinema that nobody wanted to sit behind, the one in the shop that rooted for the extra-long-legged trousers, the girl in the back row of every photograph. You see, I stick out like a sore thumb. Everyone who passes me registers me and remembers me. But despite all that, I went missing. Never mind the odd socks, never mind Jenny-May Butler; how a throbbing sore thumb on a hand so bland couldn’t be seen was the ultimate icing on the cake. The mystery that beat all mysteries was my own.

The second irony is that my job was to search for missing persons. For years I worked as a garda. With a desire to work solely on missing persons but without working in an actual division assigned to these, I had to rely solely upon the “luck” of being assigned these cases. You see, the Jenny-May Butler situation really sparked off something inside me. I wanted answers, I wanted solutions, and I wanted to find them all myself. I suppose my searching became an obsession. I looked around the outside world for so many clues I don’t think that I once thought about what was going on inside my own head.

In the Gardaí sometimes we found missing people in conditions I won’t ever forget, not for the rest of this life and far into the next, and then there were people who just didn’t want to be found. Often we uncovered only a trace, too often not even that. Those were the moments that drove me to keep looking far beyond my call of duty. I would investigate cases long after they were closed, stay in touch with families long after I should have. I realized I couldn’t go on to the next case without solving the previous, with the result that there was too much paperwork and too little action. And so knowing that my heart lay only in finding the missing, I left the Gardaí and I searched in my own time.

The families always wondered what drove me to do this. They had a reason, a link, a love for the missing, whereas my fees were barely enough for me to get by on. So, what was my motivation? Peace of mind, I suppose. A way to help me close my eyes and sleep at night.

But all of this begs the question: how can someone like me, with my physical attributes and my mental attitude, go missing?

I’ve just realized that I haven’t even told you my name. It’s Sandy Shortt. It’s OK, you can laugh. I know you want to. I would too if it wasn’t so bloody heartbreaking. My parents called me Sandy because I was born with a head of sandy-colored hair. Pity they didn’t foresee that my hair would turn as black as coal. They didn’t know either that those cute pudgy little legs would soon stop kicking and start growing at such a fast rate, for so long. So Sandy Shortt is my name. That is who I am supposed to be, how I am identified and recorded for all time. But I am neither of those things. The contradiction often makes people laugh during introductions. Normally I respond to their amusement with a shrug and a smile. But not now. You see, there’s nothing funny about being missing. I also quickly realized there’s little difference between being missing and looking for the missing: every day I search. Same as I did when I was working. Only this time I search for a way back to be found.

I have learned one thing worth mentioning. There is one huge difference in my life from before, one vital piece of evidence. For once in my life I want to go home.

What bad timing to realize such a thing. The biggest irony of all.