A field of questions.

I didn’t know why I would always find myself here. A few days would pass and I would wind up back in the same spot, struggling to search for the reason why. Was it closure I needed? Was it for concrete answers? The years had fluttered by and those questions would still fall from my lips.

Four years.

Four agonising years it had been since my sister walked out of our family home and never returned; her last breath dancing from her throat in this very clearing, in this field. I felt hollow, every single day. Nothing could ever fill the void of losing her, my best friend, the person I fought the most with, yet loved over everyone else.

Why was it in the very place that her skull was shattered, the very place her skin was sliced, and her body ravaged, was it the only place I felt closest to her? You would think it would be at home, going into her room with all of her belongings – the dance trophies, the fuchsia coloured frames of her and her school friends, but no. The only place where I felt her arms envelop around me was at the site of her horrific murder.

Inconclusive, they said. Insufficient evidence, they echoed. Uncovering my sister’s naked and abused body from underneath the moss and dirt, cutting her more than she already was to uncover possible answers did nothing.

He was out there. Watching me, perhaps? I’d been here often enough, every day it had felt like. Would he be peering through the trees, watching me traipse through greenery trying to uncover anything that may have been missed? A jagged rock that was painted with my baby sister’s blood?

Maybe I came here to hope that one day, somehow, she would give me a sign. To cause a gust of wind through my raven hair, blowing it in the direction in which she wanted me to search, uncovering something incriminating to help box in this vile predator.

Never would I be able to rest, never would I be able to be at peace with what happened to her. Perhaps closure simply had evaporated from my vocabulary – everyone else had seemed to stomach the thought of never walking through the front door again, dumping her bag and asking what was for tea. I knew she wasn’t coming back, but I wasn’t willing to let her remain a number in an unsolved police filing cabinet.

Send me away.

I didn’t care anymore.

I needed a name.

I needed an answer.

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