Look! I'm still creative in a non-psychotic way! My bf Jake Fox agrees!

You never think it can happen to you. And then it does, and then you're lost. You wonder why the world around you doesn't stop moving after you've lost the only thing that kept you going. You stare at pictures. You stare at children playing at the park. You stare at garbage bags on the side of the highway, wondering what might be inside. You want to pull over, to look inside those bags, to find absolution. But if that is your child's beaten, broken body in that bag, you don't want to see it. You want to remember her as she was, laughing and playing in the dirt. Alive. Home. You can't think of the alternative. First a few days pass, then a few weeks. The posters disappear. There aren't any more updates in the newspaper. Your friends, your family, treat you as though you never had a child at all. And you hate them. You hate them for forgetting her. You hate them for not knowing what it's like to lose a child.

Some days, you just want a call. Dead or alive, you just want to know. The uncertainty makes each day unbearable, but the hope keeps you from giving up. What if she is dead? What would you do if you got that call today? Would you take the pictures down? Would you have a funeral? Or would you just let her slip away, knowing that whatever she suffered during the last moments of her life doesn't matter now?

And if she is alive? Then what happens? She was only 4 when she disappeared. She might remember you vaguely, dream of you every now and then. But she has a new family, another woman she calls mom. She's happy with them. If you try to take her back, it would be like making her disappear all over again.

These are the thoughts that haunt me, every moment of every day. There can be no happy ending to this story. She's been gone for 6 years today. If she's alive, she's 10 years old. If she isn't...

The thought stops there. I can't think of that, not today. I can only think of what she would look like, what kind of person she would be. Does she still like Barbies? Does she still pretend she's a princess, hiding in her castle behind the big tree in the backyard?

That was the last place I saw her. It was a beautiful spring day, two weeks after her birthday. She was wearing a blue sweater over a white t-shirt and a pair of jeans with butterflies on the pockets. She insisted on wearing her new Barbie tennis shoes even though the yard was still muddy from the rain a few days earlier. She took me by the hand and pulled me outside with her. She told me that she was the princess and I was the queen, and that we had to hide in the castle from the bad men.

I remember telling the police about her charade after she disappeared. What bad men, they asked. I didn't know. I wish I did. I thought she was only playing; could she have known what was to come? A child's intuition is an amazing thing, a gift whose significance they can never truly grasp.

We played in the castle for a long time. She served tea, using leaves as cups and a stick as a teapot. I kept thinking about the laundry that needed to be folded, the floors that needed to be vacuumed. Had I known those would be the last moments I shared with my daughter, I would have enjoyed it more. I would have forgotten about everything else and rolled in the grass with her. But I was sure that we would have a hundred more days like that, a million more moments to share.

Sometimes, I say her name aloud just to hear it. Alana. Alana. Alana Maribelle. My beautiful baby girl, my only child. I wonder now if her disappearance was my punishment for that afternoon that I sat in the waiting room of the abortion clinic, knowing that ending my pregnancy was the only solution. I was 22 when I got pregnant, but I wasn't ready to settle down. I didn't think that I could raise a child, and I didn't want to tell her father about her. I knew too many girls my age, not women, who were raising babies on their own. I couldn't do it. I wasn't strong enough.

I went into one of the sterile rooms. I sat on the cold metal table, dressed only in a paper gown. I waited for the doctor to come in, to cleanse my body of the life that had been growing inside it for 7 weeks. There was a knock on the door, and the knob began to turn.

I started sobbing. I had been mulling this decision over and over in my mind since the plus sign appeared on the home pregnancy test two weeks ago, and I was sure. This was what I had to do. But suddenly I couldn't. I knew this decision was harder, that there was no turning back. I was going to have a baby. The doctor left the room and I got dressed, still crying. I hated myself for even thinking that I could end the life inside me. I ran out the front door of that place, past a pair of protesters who yelled "murderer" at me. I didn't stop to tell them that I had changed my mind. I wanted to get far away from that place as fast as I could.

Seven months later, Alana was born. Six pounds, five ounces, 18 inches long. My angel. As I looked into that tiny, beautiful face, I couldn't believe that I had ever considered ending my pregnancy. She was everything I had been waiting for my entire life. All of my hopes and dreams revolved around this tiny girl, and she quickly became the source of all my happiness. Being a single mother was hard, but Alana made it all worthwhile. Everything I did was for her.

Before she disappeared, things had been going well for us. I had a decent job, one that didn't make me work weekends and understood if I had to leave early to pick my little girl up from daycare because she didn't feel well. I had finally bought us a little house, a two-bedroom shack that I fixed up myself and that we could call our own. Alana picked out pastel pink paint for her bedroom walls vehemently, not even considering any of the other colors I showed her. She placed her hands in the wet cement after the sidewalk in front of our house was poured. I run my fingers over those tiny handprints sometimes, wondering how big her hands are now. The picture we took the day we moved into the house still sits inside on a frame on my nightstand. I thought about moving into a bigger house, even moving to a different town. Knowing that Alana knew her address and phone number by heart kept me from leaving. Maybe someday she would get away from the demons who stole her from me, and she would be able to find her way home. That hope kept me rooted where I was, unable to move forward. Time stopped for me when I called Alana's name that afternoon and she didn't come to the house.

I called her name again, again. I grew irritated at first, thinking she was just playing a game with me when I wanted her to come in for dinner. I made her favorite, lasagna and garlic bread. I had a busy night planned; a babysitter was coming over at 7 so I could go on a date. I was nervous over my first date with a guy my friend Andrea had set me up with, and Alana's refusal to cooperate only shattered my nerves further. I yelled her name one more time, adding that she wouldn't get dessert if I had to come find her. I looked to the big tree, her castle. I saw her blue sweater lying in the grass, but my daughter wasn't there.

I searched the yard. I looked through the garage, checking any space where she might be able to hide. I yelled her name frantically, knowing in the bottom of my heart that something was terribly wrong. Neighbors came outside when they heard me yelling, and they started to yell her name too. When the streetlights came on and there was no sign of Alana, I went into the house and called the police. Dinner was sitting in pans on the stove, untouched. I called for Alana inside the house while I waited for the police to come, hoping that she had snuck inside when she heard me yelling for her. I said that if she would just come out, she wouldn't be in trouble.

She wasn't there, and I knew it. Alana never liked playing hide and seek. Even when she had done something wrong, she wouldn't hide from me. We were a team, Alana and I. I punished her when it was necessary, but she always knew that I loved her, that I forgave her. She was a good girl.

The babysitter pulled up, then the squad car. The entire neighborhood was already searching for my angel baby, yelling her name as they swept the bushes with a flashlight. I answered the policeman's questions mechanically, telling him when I had last seen Alana and what she was wearing. I felt like a failure as a mother under his gaze. I never should have let her out of my sight. I was supposed to protect her, keep her safe. And I couldn't.

Andrea came over with her husband, and Jeremy was with them. I apologized to him for missing the date, and he didn't know what to say. He looked at the picture of Alana that the policeman held, then went outside to join the search party that had formed. He told me how pretty she was, that she looked just like me. She had inherited my brown curls and green eyes. I thanked him for coming to help find my little girl.

My house became ground zero for the first two weeks after Alana disappeared. Policemen came and asked me the same questions over and over again, but they never had any new information for me. There was no hope for them to give me. The statistics said that she had probably been taken by someone I knew, and that she had more than likely been killed within hours of her disappearance. People were careful not to mention that around me, but I already knew. I had watched news stories of missing children before, and they all ended the same. But those parents still waited for their child to be returned to them safely, even after years had passed. I would do the same.