Ghetto

You'd been friends with him for seven years. He was the kind of friend you could sit in the car with all night without saying a word and still feel at ease. He knew you were scared when your dad came home late from work, and he'd always text you at two in the morning to ask, "Is everything okay?"

And then he just disappeared.

It didn't happen like in the movies—no argument, no fight, no ten thousand debt. You simply texted him on Friday night: "Hey, maybe we should go to a bar? It's been a while." He read it five minutes later but didn't reply. You thought, "He's busy, he'll reply later." An hour passed, then two, then three. You chalked it up to fatigue.

The next day you called. The first ring, the second, the third—the call was cut off. "Okay, I'll call back in a couple of hours." A couple of hours later—"The subscriber is unavailable." You figured his phone had run out of battery.

A week later, you went to his house. A strange woman opened the door and said she and her husband had rented the apartment a month ago. You checked social media. His profile was still there, but his profile picture had been replaced with the standard placeholder. Friends in the group chat shrugged: "He doesn't message us either. Maybe he moved away?"

You dug through everything: his mother didn’t answer the phone, his old numbers were silent, even the girl he dated three years ago said: “I haven’t seen him for two years.”

Three months later, you were sitting in the kitchen at three in the morning, scrolling through his old voicemails. The last message he'd sent was from that Friday night—you'd sent, "Want to go to the bar?"—and he'd never responded. For some reason, you'd clicked on his contact, and that time, his phone suddenly started ringing. A long, steady ring. Your heart sank. And then—"Subscriber temporarily unavailable."

You still send him memes sometimes, hoping that one day he'll get a "read" tick. Your mutual friends have already stopped looking for him. Mom asks, "Where's your friend? I haven't seen him in a while." You drink tea and say, "He's just busy."

But you know that people don't just disappear. And every night you go over in your head where he is.