Ants Among Giants by Alicia de los Ríos Merino

When a person is disappeared, what vanishes is not only that person or their physical presence; the people around them also vanish, sometimes imperceptibly. They vanish because what stands at the center is the absence, and the absence encompasses everything, devours everything. That is how I have come to understand it over these years of learning the many different ways of living through a disappearance, through those who wait, search, fear, imagine, long. Disappearance sometimes disappears us too.

Faced with the presence of absence, children and adolescents run a particular risk of vanishing, in at least two senses. The first, because we adults are occupied with what is urgent, what is important: finding the person who was disappeared. And we pour every tool and every ounce of energy into achieving it, because that is what we want and need - to find that beloved person, to try to recover who we once were. And searching is the only verb that matters; the disappeared person is the only thing that matters. The second, because we are so afraid of disappearance and of what it does to us that we want to shield children and adolescents from that vortex of uncertainty, of doubt, of terrible and plausible imaginings; and so we try to care for them, to protect them so much that the excess of care sometimes ends up erasing them. Poor children, so defenseless, so small, so unfinished - let them not find out about any of it, let them go on believing everything is the same even as the world crumbles around them.