It had been two months since Enya left them all alone. Two months as endless as twenty-two. Where there had once been six of them in their secret base by the river, now it was five. And not one had the smile that quit with Enya. He was the noise of the lot, the joy in the ocean, the bee dancing in the spring. He was gone.
“It’s two months to this day, isn’t it?” Rue spoke in a faint voice. Everyone knew of her disposition towards Enya, especially Noelle. No one questioned her grief, neither did they try to salvage what remained of her. They had their own souls to save, from the crumbling sand that is grief.
“Sometimes, it feels as if he is still with us,” murmured Ken. He sat by the overturned wooden crate labelled ‘Explosive’ on its faces. He hadn’t forgotten to leave room to the left of it though. It was Enya’s favourite spot in their secret base. A small shed of rustic metallic sheets, small green weeds growing through the unmanned edges, a creaking door frame, and all the little memories they ever managed to make. Noelle counted the days in which they decided to travel by the riverside into the forest, it was plenty. She gave up the effort as the first rivulet of memories took shape in the edges of her eyelid.
“If only we had been more careful that day…” Trey failed to word. Yet the thought finished in everyone’s head despite it. He was keeping close watch by the rusty door they came through, most likely to hide the guise his face took to speak.
“Yeah,” the room echoed back to him.
“We all had so much more to share with him, didn’t we?” confessed Bono, traversing every face with his large brown eyes. “I mean, for once, I would like to disclose that I was not alone in stealing his lunch every day!” Bono let out a gust through his nose. Everyone shared a flicker of laughter at Bono’s annoyance. Enya would get enraged on the days he would open up his lunch-box only to find it squeaky clean before he could smell it. His mother made the best food they had ever eaten, and she even knew of this little prank they played on him. One day he caught Bono in the act of the crime, and convinced himself of Bono’s guilt in every day that followed. To prevent having his lunch taken away, Enya mixed a pile of salt in his mother’s beautiful steamed rice and curry, which upon eating gave Bono a face as if a crab bit his tongue at the nipple. Never again was Enya’s lunch taken away, yet Bono tried to prove his innocence despite being caught twice.
“I wanted to apologize to him,” said Trey, who still kept close watch by the door. The sound of drizzling rain reverberated through the entrance. “For everything I did…” he added with a heavy tone.
It hadn’t always been the most charming of relationships between the two of them. They were constantly at each other’s necks. Fighting over something pointless, disagreeing, or sometimes even ignoring the other. But Enya confessed to Noelle one day, that despite everything he considered Trey like his blood-brother.
“I’m sure he knew Trey,” she said. “He always knew the best of us.”
“And you never got to tell him how you felt, did you, Noelle?” Ken asked her.
Noelle stumbled on the upturned bucket she perched upon, with a look of shyness in her blue eyes.
“Oh come on. Everyone knew. You were pretty obvious in it,” Ken added.
Noelle looked at Rue, who smiled ever so softly at the utterance. It was a secret that the two of them held close to their chest. Often at times they would spend their nights talking about the What if?’s, the blushes, and the way Enya made the two of them laugh. In the end, their love for him stung as much as his absence. Still unconfessed, their chests felt a wrangle upon itself.
“I guess I didn’t,” Noelle answered. She looked down upon the ground where there were damp spots in the droplets.
“He was my best friend too…” Ken mumbled, scratching his hair. “Ugh… I miss that idiot!” he cried out loud. Even though the two of them had been friends for the longest, it was the first time they all heard the confession come out of Ken’s holed up voices. Ever since the day their tiny legs walked into school, Ken and Enya had been by each other’s side, and never planned to leave for as long as they lived.
As the rain picked up violently, banging upon the metal roof above their heads, the smell of dangling petrichor entered the doorway where Trey guarded at ease.
“He’s late today, isn’t he?” he asked with a hint of worry underneath. His eyes were fixated on the patch of brown earth that led to their little shed inside the forest.
Noelle sprang from her seat and went by his side. Holding an arm on his nervous shoulder, she said, “He’ll come… He always does.”
Looking at the wet green shrubs, Noelle remembered all the times they used to run around as kids, not too long ago. Of how all the time spent away from their unhappy homes led to their eventual happiness at each other’s arms. She vividly remembered the view of the shed, when Enya first took her, the new kid around school, to visit his friends at their secret base by the river. Little did she know, she was being invited to his family of six. It was much unlike the broken one she habited herself at home. Yet little did she know even that wouldn’t last as long, as another family she belonged to broke apart in silence.
Rue also joined in on the doorstep. Her extended hand tried to save the little droplets falling to death from the rooftop. Yet her palm was unable to rescue a single one. Looking at the curving path that led to their home Rue spotted a fidgeting umbrella making its way back to where it belonged. “He’s here!” she announced joyfully.
Upon her words, everyone joined in at the door, harbouring a few drops of love perched upon their hopeful eyes for no one to see.
“I thought he forgot.” Ken released a sigh of relief.
“He would never,” Noelle replied reassuringly.
With an umbrella patterned with white drops rolling along its black stripes, he walked towards the shed as he did every week for the last two months. As he reached the door, he folded up his umbrella and brushed his hair off the beads that accumulated in it.
“Sorry I’m late,” he whispered as he barged in through the door, whose creak signalled every bit of the person he was.
Noelle looked at Rue and shared a warm smile that originated at their blushing cheeks.
Enya lit up a candle which he pulled out of his backpack, and sat on his knees before the table at the far end of the shed. “Did you miss me?” he asked with a smile as wide as the day she first saw it. As the smoke from the wick began to subside for flames, Enya placed it on the table in front of the things he considered to be precious. Five photographs of his five little friends. Five photographs of them, which smiled back. He closed his eyes to pray as he did every single week for the last two months without fail. The little drops of rain which rested on his coat fell softly to the ground beneath his feet, still maintaining their shape.
Noelle looked at this familiar sight and prayed something on her own. She looked at the other four with blurry eyes and found that they too wished the same thing in their hearts. “I wish you could just turn back and find us.”
Enya’s eyes opened from their mediation and a familiar smile stamped upon his face as if it never vanished. “So, I had an eventful week!” He announced the five unmoving photographs.
“I wish you could hear our voices.”
Enya told them of his week, of how his days were like now, of how the world was like after two months, of how he still missed them every day. He told them stories that they wished they could experience again, but knew that it would never be. As the five of them stood silently, hearing his story in their transparent form that was gifted to them, their hearts felt as if it was ever so slightly moving in a familiar rhythm. It had been two whole months since they lost Enya from their little moment known as life. Two months of sorrow and grief that followed. And yet, like the frenzying rain that crumbled the ground they stood upon on that fated day, their eyes still wept tears that failed to reach the ground alive and well, it never did. It had been two months since they lost Enya to the crumbling grounds of their humble river-side cliff. It had been two months since Enya lost the five of them to the sorrow known as life.
