While news feeds are flooded with stories about Karen Ristevski – and the Mount Macedon man who was charged with her disappearance on Tuesday – there’s one person I can’t stop thinking about.
Sarah Ristevski. Karen’s 22-year-old daughter.
While speculation intensifies as to who killed the Avondale Heights woman, and the media carefully poise cameras out the front of the Ristevski family home, Sarah is behind the door, shielding herself from the whirring lights, invisibly grieving the mother who raised her – the mother who inexplicably and mysteriously vanished into the Melbourne daylight on June 29, 2016.
This news story is Sarah Ristevski's life.
One that, before thick black disaster swamped everything, was quiet; the life of any ordinary university student with a mum and a dad and a house in the suburbs. A life that spanned years of buttered sandwiches, school reports, grazed knees and sleepy Christmas mornings.
What on earth would it feel like to be living Sarah Ristevski's life today?
Listen: What it's like when a loved one goes missing. Loren O'Keeffe shares her story. (Post continues after podcast...)
With every new development and breaking news story, I ache for what she's endured over the past 18 months and what she's set to endure for the years to come. It's a pain I can't possibly imagine, a nightmare so intense it's as if it were written for a horror film, not for a normal millennial from Melbourne's north-west.