By Hermione Silver, Y9
It had been a few hours. She was missing. Helicopters scoured the unforgiving, spinning sea, hopelessly. Boats crashed over the waves looking for something, anything, but all the searchlights showed was the deep, dark blue of the water and the occasional branch left floating from the storm. The lifeguards had already searched a five-kilometer radius around where she was last seen and the odds were not looking good. By now she could’ve wound up washed up on the shore, or worse.
I’d reported her disappearance about two hours earlier. Shannon was doing an evening swim as she often does, while I was having a coffee in a café by the shore. That’s when I heard gusts of wind getting more and more powerful by the second and sprinted to the water… nothing. Thankfully the lifeguards hadn’t left, and I alerted them. As time passed, more and more people were recruited. The next thing I knew, I was standing alone on a cold Monday evening watching a flurry of boats rushing around the scene looking for my sister, or whatever’s left of her. I had an awful image in my mind of an hourglass: sand seeping through, time running out.
It’s been two days since and I wish I could tell you she’s alive but my hope is heavily outweighed by the facts; she hasn’t been found. I have this constant knot in my stomach, telling me to look for her. It’s pathetic at this point. I can’t settle with the uncertainty; I need closure. Whether it be good or bad, I just want an answer. People have stopped looking–now they’re mourning–and soon they’ll forget and she’ll be but a distant memory. Maybe they’re right, that I can’t hold on to this false hope, dragging me down, drowning me in thoughts. But I don’t want to forget; I just want her here, with me.
