Release me. Now. Or I ****** shoot this girl now. Do as I tell you or he** ****** dies!” I began to plead. “Don’t listen to him!” The girl pleaded. “Look, he’s the nice man, calm down. We don’t have to do this, we can do something else.” She tried to comfort me, but to no avail. My panic was coming to an end, but the young man’s had yet to begin. “Now are you going to listen to me? Or are we going to shoot this girl?” “Ok ok…” I answered, “I’ll give you my phone number.” I took out my phone and began to enter the number. I was about to give it to him when he snatched the phone from my hands, and walked to the other side of the roof and stepped onto the ledge. He let out a guttural scream as he jumped off the roof, disappearing before anyone knew what had happened. I looked at him and saw fear in the young man’s eyes, and in the faces of everyone else. They all scrambled for their things and ran off down the hill. I walked off down the alleyway, hoping to find a police station, but before I did, the police came driving past me, sirens blaring. I had taken my chances and got away. The Police came and took witness statements and found nothing. Neither the girl, nor the boy were ever found. They took the phones, which were all broken and the broken parts matched. No traces of fingerprints, DNA or footprints were found at the scene. The boy jumped from the roof, and nothing ever came back from him, not one trace. All that is left now is a hole in the roof, a missing girl and a broken, abandoned warehouse. The story has become known as the disappearing girl, but to me it’s much more than that. I became a ghost as soon as I stepped off that roof. I went from a rich, happy twenty-something to a broke, homeless person, the disappearance of which could very well be considered a suicide. I have no memory of the time between the end of the day at the warehouse and the next morning in my apartment. When I woke up, I was without a single memory of the day before. All that was left was the hole in the roof, a missing girl, a broken, abandoned warehouse and a broken, damaged cell phone. I didn’t know who I was, what I did or what happened to me. I still have the broken phone in my backpack. It has a cracked screen and a few cracks running up the body. I couldn’t delete the photos on it because they were all deleted before I woke up, with no trace left. All I can remember is the two words that I used to call to me, the most powerful words ever created. “Become a ghost.” To conclude: Every day we go through our lives, making new memories and forgetting the old ones. Mostly we do it without even thinking, and it’s these little things that turn us into who we are. Like, we go to bed and we wake up the next day, and in a few days we won’t remember it, but it’s this little cycle, that makes us who we are. We forget all the little things, and sometimes we need help to remember what happened to us and what we have done, and sometimes we can find this help in the form of a bottle. It doesn’t matter if it’s beer or gin, it’s just a reminder, a reminder to not forget and to keep going. Thank you very much for reading, and please leave a comment. Abraham C. C. aka “Boo Boo” [Photo credits: “Ghost Stories,” by Thomas James. Via Pixabay]