By the discarded pile, a visible crease of a newspaper shows the grown perceived image of a lost child missing since 2013. Corrugated marks with a small scissor between the lines surround the advert space, as if I was to cut out the description, and put it in a wallet with my other gathered markings of missing people. Perhaps they’d expect me to lift the paper up with one eye, and compare the supposed 25 year old boy with the other souls, shuffling across the metro with their heads down and turned, leaning on the benches sleeping,  and carrying slings and canes and neck braces. What would I do if I was ever to find him? “Michael. Come home. Your mother worries about you so much.”
Certainly I couldn’t pin him. How to find someone who is certainly lost, and may not want to be found. Or long dead, there face strewn in sticks in a bush somewhere, a quiet overdose, or a night to cold, a placid end for an unfortunate, all to long suffering individual. What happens to those who disappear. Their names are whispered, until there grows a time in which no one remembers. I’d like to keep it together, his memory, as my pressing finger traces his face, and I imagine his mind racing out there. I’ll remember the lost, I’ll try, I say to myself as I tear his face from the page and into my pocket. A grandiose and otherwise futile gesture. I’ll keep them all, sure.