The room she was last found in before she kissed the bottom 

of the ocean is pitch black. 

The bright white from flashlights formed a lit-up circle 

on the inspectors’ faces, before the light turned around to show

photographs reporting news amid the war, the people it took from

her. 

Notebooks with notes before it was named a notebook, and a mass of 

entries one scribbles when they are about to jump in the water and never resurface.

Letters to her family that plea them to be alive

or to pray that they wouldn’t ask her how to survive the war

because she didn’t know.

And the investigators came too late,

after all the damage was done and her mysterious rich uncle’s inheritance had nowhere to go.

Those who should’ve gotten it were taken without 

reason, too many were taken without reason, the investigators thought

as they looked through drawers in a dresser.

My grandfather was among them. He opened the drawer and found 

that there wasn’t much more to find-

only someone else’s past.