Local Woman Missing

by Mary Kubica

That’s not to say I didn’t think about you. I thought about you a lot when you were gone, though all I ever knew was the absence of you.

But for as much as people think the internet knows everything, the one thing it doesn’t say is that the girl who came back isn’t the same one who disappeared.

Now, over a decade later, I realize that at twenty-three or twenty-four, I didn’t know much of anything. I still had so much growing up to do, so much to figure out about how the world worked.