{"id":7442,"date":"2025-05-19T09:29:59","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T08:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edgeverse.org\/?p=7442"},"modified":"2025-05-20T04:38:04","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T03:38:04","slug":"maria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/edgeverse.org\/?p=7442","title":{"rendered":"Maria"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Maria<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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By A.P. Atkinson<\/h5>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Life is a series of events. People think that our existence passes by one second at a time, our lifespan ebbing away in a perfectly measured flow, like grains of sand passing through a cheap plastic egg-timer. But why do people think this, when it so obviously isn\u2019t true?
Life is a staggered, juddering staccato, a lumbering, shuddering journey as we lurch from one thing to the next. We don\u2019t age a moment at a time, one second bleeding into minutes, hours and days. We age less smoothly, stresses and strains smashing us down one terrible event at a time.
Sometimes, if misfortune singles you out for special treatment, a single event can destroy you forever, even if you are unlucky enough to survive it.
This is exactly what happened to me.
It happened three years ago, a day that changed everything forever and brought my world crashing down around me.
It was a beautiful day, a clear blue sky above us and lush green grass beneath our feet. The days of my weeks were spent in a grey building, air-conditioning growling away behind me while unnaturally cold air stung my lungs. I worked myself half to death, pouring out the best of myself for reasons that now escape me. I would tap numbers into a computer as instructed by my employer. In exchange, they would give me just enough money to provide a limited but acceptable life for my family. I never questioned it. When I was at school, we knew we were preparing for a life of labour, providing our span of years to the service of an uncaring system. I never considered the big picture, that there might be any other option. Are criminals really the sane ones?
At weekends, I would try to take my family out of my grim little world. This time, we went to a national park for the day. My wife made lunch and we packed some toys into the back of our small car. A short ride out of the city and we found ourselves at the edge of a field, surrounded by tall trees, cloaking the grassy floor with their welcoming cool shade. The air felt fresh and soft, unlike the harsh chemical taste of the office atmosphere.
My wife grumbled benignly about every little detail while I laughed in good nature at her, trying to shrug off her negativity. Our daughter, Maria, ran off screaming and chasing bubbles she blew from a little lime-green tube of soapy water.
My wife pointed at her and scowled. \u201cPhil,\u201d she said grumpily. \u201cShe\u2019s going to fall and hurt herself!\u201d
I shrugged and took a bite out of a sausage roll. \u201cI couldn\u2019t catch her if I tried,\u201d I said with a chuckle. \u201cLet her play; we don\u2019t get a lot of days like this. Let her enjoy them.\u201d
\u201cStay where I can see you!\u201d she shouted at the top of her lungs, her voice echoing softly from the trees.
Maria shouted something back, but the words were lost to me. I just smiled.
\u201cThere are bears in the woods,\u201d she said to me. \u201cWolves too, maybe.\u201d
I smiled. \u201cShe\u2019s not going into the woods,\u201d I said. \u201cIf there are any bears around here, they\u2019ll have the good sense to stay away from her before her screaming bursts their eardrums.\u201d
My wife scowled. She hated parks; she hated being out of the city. She had wanted to go to a shopping mall and spend the day dragging me around clothes shops. She had been outvoted by Maria and I, and she was grumpy about it.
\u201cWhy don\u2019t you go play with her while I set out the rest of the picnic,\u201d she told me.
I snatched another sausage roll and bit into it, even though they were actually pretty terrible.
My wife was not the world\u2019s best cook, which was putting it somewhat mildly. Part of the reason she objected to going to a park was that she\u2019d have to prepare the food, I imagine. She could even ruin a sandwich, and that was the full extent of her culinary talent.
But we never noticed. We\u2019d eat what she gave us, for the most part. Maria even liked her cooking. What did a 5 year old kid know about anything, I guess?
\u201cDid you speak to Morgan?\u201d she asked, hefting a box of cakes from the back of the car. \u201cWhat\u2019s meant to be happening with your promotion?\u201d
My heart sank in my chest. I didn\u2019t want to talk about work during the weekends. I wanted to escape from it, to get away and snatch a few moments of freedom from the endless apathetic grind of my weekly routine.
\u201cI haven\u2019t seen him,\u201d I said, and I could hear the frustration in my own voice. \u201cLet\u2019s not talk about that today, let\u2019s just enjoy the weather.\u201d
She glared and sighed deeply. \u201cWe need the money, Phil.\u201d
I huffed out a deep breath. \u201cI know,\u201d I said. \u201cI know we do, but let\u2019s just not do this today.\u201d
\u201cIf I could work, I would,\u201d she said. Clearly she wasn\u2019t going to let this go. She never did. \u201cWhen I was diagnosed bi-polar you said you could manage. You said you could earn enough to support the three of us.\u201d
I knew what I\u2019d said, because I was there when I said them. And when those words left my lips, I absolutely believed them to be true. I thought I could earn myself a promotion and get myself out of staff-training and into a managerial role. It didn\u2019t matter that I loved working with the team, I would put all that aside to chase a pay rise, and I\u2019d accept it because I was doing it for my family, the people I loved most in all the world.
It hadn\u2019t been as easy as I had thought.
\u201cMaybe you just don\u2019t want a promotion?\u201d she said with a snide lilt to her voice, a cutting tone she used far too often these days.
I couldn\u2019t lie, she knew me too well for me to get away with it. \u201cYou\u2019re right, I don\u2019t,\u201d I admitted. \u201cBut that doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m not doing everything I can to get one.\u201d
\u201cThe mortgage payments are going up in three months,\u201d she reminded me, yet again.
\u201cI know,\u201d I said with a nod. I knew all too well. We were barely making ends meet now.
\u201cWell then you need to do something,\u201d she nagged, the same voice she used when she would scold Maria\u2014something else she was doing far more often these days.
She handed me a knife, a long, slender blade I had sharpened only last weekend. \u201cCut the cake,\u201d she told me, flashing me a look of bitter disappointment, a look she knew I hated more than any of the berating jibes. Every time I saw that look in her eyes, it killed a tiny little part of my soul.
I held the knife for a moment and a darkness came over me. I could end it all now, and for a fraction of a second I wondered why I didn\u2019t. Why did I keep going to the same job, a job I increasingly hated? Why did I put up with her constantly moaning at me? Why did I stand by as my wife changed, until I barely recognised her as the woman I once married? Why was life so hard?
And then the answer to all of that flashed through my mind.
Maria.
She had changed everything in my life, and I would do anything for her, even if it meant dying one day at a time, slowly selling my life for a handful of lime-green tubes filled with bubbles, foul-tasting sausage rolls, and cakes that didn\u2019t come pre-sliced.
\u201cMaria,\u201d I said. I looked around. \u201cWhere is my little girl?\u201d
\u201cFunny she\u2019s suddenly your little girl when it isn\u2019t bath-time, or her dinner doesn\u2019t need cooking,\u201d she grumbled. I could barely recognise her some days. When I met her, she had been so full of life, so energetic and so caring. Was this my fault? If it wasn\u2019t, then why did she blame me? Why did I blame myself?
I looked around. There was no sign of her. \u201cCarol, where\u2019s Maria?\u201d
\u201cPlaying,\u201d she said, but even the tone of her voice was shifting.
My chest tightened and I felt a rising panic. \u201cWhere the hell is she?\u201d
\u201cPhil?\u201d she cried out, her head snapping from one side to the other, desperately peering around. \u201cWhere is she?\u201d
Now, the trees looked grim; now, their comfortable, inviting shade seemed like a threatening darkness, a vile blackness that swallowed up your very soul.
There was a sickening silence. The sound of a child playing, the happy squeals of a little girl running around with her toys wasn\u2019t missing, it felt like it had been silenced, leaving a gaping chasm in reality.
I didn\u2019t think about what to do next, but somehow I knew I was running. My chest was heaving. I had never been fit, and I was feeling it now as I ran with every ounce of power I could muster, the muscles in my legs burning already as I made my way into the trees.
I shouted out her name as I ran into the edge of the woods.
I searched for hours.
My wife called the police, and slowly, crowds began to arrive. Volunteers flooded in, and I remember wondering at the time where they had all come from. How did they know? Would I have volunteered if I had heard someone else\u2019s child went missing? I honestly didn\u2019t know. Did I deserve their help? Probably not, but Maria did.
They searched for hours, and those hours bled into days, and the days melted into weeks.
They never found anything.
Not even a shoe.<\/p>

Nothing was ever the same after that, and it took me three years to work it all out, to figure out how you can carry on after something like this has happened. When you lose a child, you lose the best part of yourself and you will never be the same again. The guilt that this is all your fault eats away at you, destroying you from the inside out. You question everything, reliving the moment over and over again.
Did any of that day happen the way I remember it? I honestly don\u2019t know anymore. Did I do enough to find her? Should I have made sure she stayed closer to us?
I laid awake at night, gazing into the darkness, wondering how Maria had felt. Was there a moment where she turned around and realised there was nothing there but trees, no path to take her back, and that she was trapped away from us? How did she feel when night fell, the shadows giving way to cold, hard blackness in which she knew that nobody was coming to find her.
And how did she die? Did she freeze to death on the first night, animals chewing away on her remains until her body was swallowed up? Did she fall into a river, drowning in the freezing depths as waves of panic filled her tiny little mind and brackish water flooded into her body? Did a predator find her? A bear? A wolf? Did it hunt her down while she ran, lost in terror for the last dwindling moments of her young life?
You live these moments on an endless loop, time after time as your mind plays them out, infinitely exploring every dark and twisted possibility. And there\u2019s no escape. The horrors followed me into my dreams in the few snatched hours of fitful sleep I was occasionally able to grasp.
I look at myself in the mirror and I don\u2019t know the man looking back at me. I had dark brown hair before, now it\u2019s just grey. My eyes are framed by deeply-wrinkled, blackened skin from the endless sleepless nights. My youthful energy is gone. I\u2019m little more than a husk now, a hollowed out shell of a man.
My wife fared even worse than I did. We stayed together at first, but neither of us knew why. We lost the house, and she was forced to go back to work, eventually getting a job in a supermarket. I hoped it would be a distraction for her, but it wasn\u2019t, and she quickly spiralled down into her own mind.
She lives with her mother now. Her father died last year, a broken man. He loved Maria as much as we all did. I haven\u2019t seen her in months, but I hear she\u2019s barely coherent. I don\u2019t know what medication she\u2019s on, but it has scooped up every ounce of her humanity and ripped it out of her.
I hired a detective. I never got my promotion, but I rented a cheap bedsit and spent every dollar I earned on finding my daughter. There was still some tiny shred of hope that she had been found somehow and was still alive. I clung to that possibility with everything I had left.
I closed the door to my car, the same car that had taken us to the forest that fateful day. I\u2019m going to see her now. After three years, I am finally going to see her again, that round, smiling face with her mother\u2019s messy hair tumbling from her head, those chocolate-brown eyes that always sparkled with cheeky energy.
The engine purrs in the car and I make myself comfortable in the seat. This won\u2019t take long.
I find myself smiling, the first time in as long as I can remember. This is finally happening.
The smell reminds me of the air conditioning at work, only the air is warm this time, not bitterly cold as it vents down my back. It\u2019s strangely soothing, comforting in a way.
There is a rubber hose; I found one in the same lime-green colour, just because it seemed the right thing to do. The hose is sticking in through the passenger window and the gap around it is stuffed with old shirts. The other end is fixed to the exhaust and the gases are slowly filling my lungs.
It won\u2019t take much longer now and I\u2019ll be able to see her again.
I wonder if she\u2019ll blame me for what happened, the way I blame myself. I wonder if she\u2019ll forgive me.
Don\u2019t worry, Maria.
Daddy\u2019s coming.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Maria is a deeply emotional tale that was based on a tragically true story. Seth often took his daughter to play in a national park. He read an article about a child who vanished there and was never seen again. The parents were never able to come to terms with the loss and accept the grim reality of the situation.
Seth and I spoke about the story at length and eventually, as parents ourselves, this story was the inevitable outcome. It\u2019s a sad and grim story where we explore the emotional impact of what we might expect to go through if such a terrible thing were to happen to us.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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