「故事·听力」My Girlfriend Went Missing But Reappeared After 2 Years

My Girlfriend Went Missing But Reappeared After 2 Years

I'm Brian, and I want to tell you how my girlfriend went missing, I almost went crazy, and two years later, I received a message from her.

Since childhood, it's been hard for me to communicate with other people, I felt uncomfortable in the company of other people, and I`m afraid of big crowds. This is called Social Anxiety Disorder or simply social phobia. The modern world allows me to live comfortably with this disease. Everything I need can be delivered to my house, I can take college classes at home, and communicate with friends via the internet. By the way, chatting with friends is not a problem at all, because I don`t have friends. The only people I communicate with is guys from a group with a similar problem as mine. Through this group, I met Alice.

She's 17 years old, she is very beautiful, and she's also funny. Sometimes, I even wondered how she might have problems with communication, because she is very energetic and joyful. And I was even more surprised about why she wanted such a weird long-distance relationship with me. She lived in New York, on the other side of America. But I didn't complain. We spent a lot of time together, chatting with each other and making video dates. In general - we had as healthy a relationship as two social phobic people could get. One day, she told me that her parents were going to move to China, and that they were taking her with them. She convinced me that the only thing that would change in our relationship was the time zone, but I still felt something ominous, as if a really close person was leaving me. 

The day of departure arrived. She literally informed me about every step: “We left the house,” “We got into the taxi,” “We arrived at the airport.” The last message I received from her was, "We just boarded the plane, going to turn off the phone. Next message you'll get will be from China."

The flight was long, and I waited a long time for a message from her, but nothing came. Not even the next day. I became worried. What if something happened to her? I checked all the flights from New York to China. All the planes had landed successfully. Then I spent the whole day reading the Chinese news and looking for headlines with accidents. But I didn't find anything, and this made me even more nervous.

One day later, I decided to take action: It was scary but I overcame my social phobia, left the house, and went to the police. I didn`t even know what I was going to do there, but I couldn`t stay at home any longer. When I entered the station, I asked the on-duty officer: “Sorry, this is very urgent, my girlfriend is gone, you have to help me!” - I began to get very nervous. The policeman sat me in a chair and calmed me down. He asked her name and where I last saw her. "Alice. She was in New York, I dated with her online, and a couple days ago, she flew with her parents to China, and since that time she hasn't gotten online. Something happened to her!” The policeman must have thought that I was just some weird guy who was duped by a girl he met on the internet and he said that they couldn`t do anything because she flew away with her parents, so, technically, she's not missing. But if something happened to them in China, then this can be found out through the US Consulate in China. That was my next step.

I wrote a request to the consulate, but due to the fact that I am not a relative, it is prohibited to give me any information unless I prove that I am not a stranger to their family. That was the problem. We were in a relationship for one year, but all we had in common was a Messenger chat with a bunch of memes and thousands of minutes of FaceTime calls. No pictures together, no other contacts, I don't even know what her parents look like. This was first time that I realized we were just ghosts in each other's lives.

The consulate refused my request. At that moment, I was angry at everyone on Earth. Nobody cares about anything. That’s why social phobia exists. Because people are evil and selfish! I was desperate. My last chance was a private detective, he`d at least do it for the money, after all. I found a detective online, described my problem, told him everything I know. He assured me that everything would take a week, max. Every day I was on pins and needles. I was nervous all the time, I slept poorly and completely lost my appetite. I felt like soon I'd at least find out what had happened.

The detective's call woke me up early in the morning. He told me something I didn`t expect to hear at all: Alice and her parents did not leave America. I asked the detective “What? Are you sure?” “Absolutely. They flew to another state, but returned two days later.” I was shocked.