Chapter 5: When the Wind Comes Back
Days passed.
Then weeks.
She didn't return.
The school felt emptier than ever. Louder, somehow, in her absence. He stopped talking again. But it wasn't the same kind of silence. This time, it wasn't because he was lost — it was because he was remembering.
He kept every note she ever gave him.
The paper cranes. The little doodles. The sentence she once scribbled when he was asleep in class:
"If you forget how to fly, I'll be the sky."
He read that line every night.
Sometimes, he'd go back to the cliff where they ran like kids with wings. Sit there. Watch the wind.
And one day, something changed.
He closed his eyes… and felt her.
Not in the ghost-story kind of way.
But in the way the breeze lifted his hair.
The way the leaves danced with no music.
The way the sky felt like it was watching.
And then — he heard it.
"Hey…"
Her voice. Faint. But clear.
He opened his eyes.
Nothing there.
But the air was heavier. Sweeter. Alive.
Then, beside him, tucked between two wildflowers — a folded note.
He froze.
Hands shaking, he opened it slowly.
In her familiar looping handwriting:
"This world was never meant to keep me. But you were.
Live enough for the both of us.
And if one day, you feel like falling again — come here.
I'll be waiting.
In the wind. In the sky. In the silence."
His heart cracked wide open.
But instead of breaking… it bloomed.
He cried, yes. He screamed into the sky. He laughed and cursed and sobbed and smiled.
Because even if she was gone…
She never really left.
She had given him the one thing no one else did:
A reason.
A reason to look up.
To feel.
To breathe.
To be.
He went back to school the next day — not perfect, not healed… but real.
He joined the literature club.
Started writing stories.
Poems. Letters. Things he could never say with his voice, but could shout with ink.
He spoke to others. Slowly. Awkwardly. But he tried.
And the sky?
He still watched it every day.
But now, he watched it with a smile.
Because he knew…
Somewhere up there, where the silent meets the sky —
She was watching too.