The Missing Pages

My life came with a table of contents.

A childhood.
An education.
A handful of people
I was certain I would never lose.

Everything in its proper place,
every year accounted for.

Except the gaps.

Three pages missing
between the summer I turned twelve
and the winter I turned thirteen.

A year I couldn't remember
no matter how hard I tried.

A face that appeared in dreams
but never in photographs.

I asked my mother about it once.

She looked at me strangely.

“Nothing happened that year,” she said.

But why would a book
remove the pages
where nothing happened?

Years later, I found the manuscript
in a secondhand bookstore.

My name on the cover.
My handwriting in the margins.

And three pages
carefully torn from the binding.

The bookseller said the previous owner
had left a note inside.

I unfolded it.

You keep asking what you lost.
You never ask what you chose to forget.

Beneath it was a photograph.

A garden.
A little boy.
A girl holding his hand.

On the back, in my handwriting:

The happiest day of my life.

I turned the photograph over again.

The boy was me.

The girl was my sister.

I have never had a sister.

At least, that is what
every page of my life says.

And suddenly, for the first time,
I understood why the book was incomplete.

Not because someone had taken
my memories away.

But because somewhere in the story,
I had become a person
who could survive only by forgetting.

I closed the book.

I couldn't bear to read further.

But on the final page,
beneath the words The End,
someone had written one last sentence:

“He was happy here.
That is why he had to leave.”