She was a kindred spirit, a breath of fresh air. I met her when we were both 19 years old, college students transitioning from childhood to young adulthood.

She'd had a lazy eye and a weight problem as a child, and she had to work twice as hard for every good grade at school as did most of her classmates. She confided in me that she was an outcast as a teen and the victim of cruel jokes. She'd never had a boyfriend. She wasn't "cool." While her family and friends appreciated her enthusiasm and thousand watt smile, others snickered at her eccentric fashion style (quite a hodgepodge) and late blooming. When I met her in 1994, her parents' marriage had just imploded and the family's comfortable lifestyle evaporated into  bankruptcy. She fled her hometown and followed her older sister to college two states away. 

When I met her, she was a pint-sized dynamo ready to grab the world by the balls. I'll never forget her bursting through the door of our apartment to tell me something exciting about her day - cheeks rosy, eyes shining brightly, dazzling smile, wild black curly hair sticking every which way. She was a work-study student in college, heavy on both work and study. She was fearless in social situations, a go-getter, someone who everyone remembered.  I could tell she had been through a room by the massive shedding of papers, shoes, and jackets (to my neat-freak chagrin).  She was ecstatic about dancing, kicking and flailing her arms, which might have been embarrassing had she not been adorable and so clearly enjoying life.  She was coming into full bloom when I met her, no doubt. She was the kind of gal this world needs more of.

We had four years of best-friendship and were surely headed for a lifetime of it. I can still recall sitting on the roof and the ease with which she talked candidly, vulnerably about her life and dreams. Her voice stays with me to this day. The last year I knew her, she graduated from business school, had her first boyfriend, her first car, and her first "real job."  I got married, bought a condo and a dog and started veterinary school, and she moved our old dishes into her own apartment with her new cat. No longer roommates, we talked on the phone often.

I got the news from her sister when I was on vacation. She was gone. Vanished. She had been home alone.  Neighbors heard a struggle at 4:00 am on a Sunday morning, but no one helped her. No one even looked out the window.

Those days were filled with numbness. We hung fliers, held vigils, talked with the police, looked at surveillance photos of people I had never seen. Nothing. Her apartment management insisted we move her belongings out by the end of the month. We gathered there and talked hopefully for the sake of her mother and sister. What about psychogenic fugue? I heard about that in psychology class.  We packed up her life and moved it away. We'll just put this stuff at a relative's house until she comes back. We didn't mention the obvious remains of the crime lab's work - carbon fingerprinting everywhere, carpet cut away, bed stripped - although my mind was screaming. Were those her tiny palm prints on the floor inside the front door? Whose shoeprint is on the door?

It was a holding pattern that lasted for years. I knew the worst must have happened. I'm a realist.

In my earliest dream after she disappeared, she was pale and wan, and I asked her if she was dead. She answered I don't know. I couldn't be alone in a room. Even with my husband home, I slept with all the outside lights on, alarm system armed, two big dogs in the house, phone by the bed. I used to tell people what had happened soon after I met them, thinking it would explain something about why I was the way I was. Joyless. 

I eventually stuffed it down just under the surface. Still, I was looking for a way to memorialize her. Should I get a symbolic tattoo? Too cliché? On her birthday each year, I donated $100 to worthy charities, yet it rang hollow. Five years after her disappearance, I was fortuitous in hearing a news broadcast about the Spirit of Women park in plans for the university where we had spent those light-filled years. I organized a group of friends who were all missing her, and we donated enough money to purchase the largest tile for incorporation into a wall of granite with cascading waterfalls. The wall would be the focal point of the park. Our tile was simple, a bouquet of flowers, her name and birth date, and three words: daughter, sister, friend.  Her sister, mother,  close friend and I went to the dedication ceremony. A small slice of healing.

Life went on. My mind went to some dark places. On road trips, I scanned the ditches and shoulders of the road looking for person-shaped tarps and bundles. I cringed every time I heard about a body being found (which is often, when you're listening for it). I wondered how there could be anywhere on Earth where a body could lie for years without being discovered.

Oh, but there were dreams, good dreams, as well. I walked with her, talked with her, in extreme vividness. In one dream, I lounged in a room full of enraptured people while she told her life's narrative, cheeks rosy as ever. I woke up missing her more than ever. 

And then the horror resurfaced, six-and-a-half  years after the mysterious night in her apartment that ended with her front door wide open and no trace of her. I had just delivered my first son and was stumbling around in a zombie state when I heard on the TV news about remains being discovered at the edge of a wooded area a few miles from our city, beneath some brush, tossed like trash and disrupted by animals. Female skeletal remains, short stature. This person had a wonderful set of perfectly even teeth said the sheriff. It would have been notable to whoever knew her.  Within a day, I got a phone call from her brother-in-law. I was nursing my son when my husband handed me the phone. It's her he said, but I already knew it would be.

I had always felt deeply for her family. Considering the pain I was in, I knew their wounds must be deeper. It finally hit me, though, as a new mother. Every night as I sat in my son's room feeding him, I ached for HER mother. I thought of her as a baby and of all the years her parents put into nurturing her. While I knew her as a woman, they probably still saw her as the little girl she once was. At her memorial service, the photos of her as a child, her trophies, her notes, her tiny cast from when she broke her ankle, all made me cry. Oh, all the mothers. I don't know how they can even go on after losing a child. Her family took her ashes to the Spirit of Women park and scattered them in the grass, letting the wind and rain disperse her everywhere. She has no headstone. I walk through the park on occasion, find a small stone and place it on top of the granite wall by her tile in the Jewish tradition of marking that someone was there to remember and honor her short life that was well lived. 

It has been 10 years, 6 months and 10 days since she was murdered by person(s) unknown to anyone but perhaps her cat. Someone walks the streets with an awful secret, and I don’t know how he (making an assumption of maleness here based on statistics and logistics) does it.  I suppose that he stuffs it all inside and tries to move on not entirely unlike we who loved her do. There is a silver lining in not knowing, which is that I can hope the circumstances of her death were somehow less horrific than they might have been. Not all murders are equally cruel, I suppose.

She has missed everything in 10 years. I've had two babies. Her sister is married and has twins. Her mother moved away to a place with sunnier skies. Her father has died. The world has changed, for good and for bad. The world has missed her presence.  She would still have it by the balls if she were here, and I sometimes try to grab it by the balls myself in her honor.

After she was found and memorialized, I had another vivid dream. This time, we were in our old college apartment, packing up her belongings slowly. We were wistful, lingering, wanting to spend more time in that moment but aware that we had no more. We carried her things upstairs in the apartment, where sunshine streamed through the windows and the air smelled of baby powder. Newness. We stepped out onto the roof and found ourselves in a beautiful harbor. She embraced me and disappeared.