“Do you think it’ll stay this warm through the week?”

The young woman turned to meet, as she believed, the gaze of her male acquaintance, as he lay on the grassy hill beside her. Instead, she found him staring off into the brook below, his eyes fixated on how the water rushed white over a particular patch of stones. 

“I don’t believe today is much warmer than yesterday,” she replied, “except that the sun is out now, and it makes us feel warm.”

At this response, he finally turned back to face her with an air of confusion.

“Is that not…”

The shape of the boy’s face, furrowed and tense, told clearly his intention to argue this point. But upon finding the eye of his old friend, and feeling the warmth of a stray sunbeam on his tightened brow, he seemed to lose any motivation to do so.

“… that makes sense enough.”

At this admission, the two rolled back in tandem and turned their vision toward the sky.

“Do you remember, Melanie,” the boy suddenly blurted out, “when we would point out shapes in the clouds together?”

“I do.”

And so the two returned to their silence, with their eyes still fixed on the clouds. Both of them looked for something there—an elephant, an umbrella, the old school-house—but found only white vastness. The best image either of them could come up with was a pillow, or a dollop of whipped cream. 

This silent rumination continued for a while, as each of them chewed on their thoughts. Both of them wished to speak; they had more to say to one another than they had time to say it. But the weight of silence can be overwhelming at times, and neither of the two had enough strength or willpower to push it away. Instead, both of them took this a chance to soak in the familiar sounds of this landscape. The treeline shook with wind, much to the agitation of the many birds about them, who chirped their resignation for the weather to each other as they bounced back and forth between branches. The side of the hill the two had chosen to lay down on faced towards the brook, meaning neither of them could feel the cold chill of this April breeze. They heard it, though, and felt it deeply in their hearts.

The silence was suddenly broken after a length of time neither of the two could have recalled, when the boy pulled himself from the grass and shuffled downhill to the water’s edge without a word. Taking a rounded stone from under the surface and holding it between his fingers, he cast it into the bushes beneath the trees in a swift motion. The rustling of leaves and crying of birds that followed seemed to pull young Melanie from her waking sleep.

“It is nice to be together again, William. Life has been moving too fast lately, and it feels like I never get a chance to catch my breath.”

The boy held onto these words for a moment. His amber eyes were still locked to the stream beneath him, following the movement of a half-snapped twig across the face of the water. 

“It is.”

This half-thought response brought the two back into a lull of silence. This time, though, it lasted no longer than a minute. Melanie rose at this point from her seat on the hill and carefully made her way to the side of William, who met her arrival with a cursory glance. He decided, after a few long moments, to break the silence once again; this time, though, his voice seemed much less resolute.

“I’m not sure why, but the sun is shining so brightly today, and yet I don’t feel warm at all. I wonder what that means?”

Melanie’s head lowered with her gaze toward the sound of rushing water. She couldn’t see his face, but she felt his half-smile through the broken tone of his words.

“Oh no, William… you shouldn’t say things like that. It’s such a beautiful day today.”

“I’m sorry, you’re right,” he admitted with a sigh. “It’s just that, you being here is making me miss how it used to be, Mel. When I could wake up in the morning and know for a fact that you would be around. I was so happy then. And I am happy now, sometimes, I suppose, but I haven’t been lost in the sound of my own laughter in such a long time.”

Melanie had nothing to say. Her previous drive to break the silence between them now waned in strength, and her heart, though beating still, was far too fragile to handle the sight of her oldest friend in such a troubled state. From this moment on the two both held their breath, sitting with one another in quiet consideration. Each hoped to find some words, to pull a sharp sentence out from the recesses of their mind that might cut through the tension they had brought upon themselves through their tendency to wait and watch. But they couldn’t. Not like they used to.

The wind was still now. Above them, in the trees, the birds had returned to their usual song and dance. Both of them knew that soon they would have to do the same, but there was a certain satisfaction in holding onto a fleeting feeling with another, knowing every passing moment could be the last you got to spend with them. Even moments like this could be pleasant—moments filled with such straining, invasive emotions—when you spent them with someone who you’d rather have held onto, at least for a few more minutes.

A few more minutes. It had been that long, hadn’t it? Neither of the two would have known—not until the sound of rolling wheels on well-tread dirt brought them each back into the world. Melanie looked upwards into the sky, glancing past the clouds to catch how far the sun had crept across the horizon since she’d left for the river; William, instead, only looked into Melanie’s eyes, but found in them everything he needed to know. She rose in an instant, adjusting her hat and turning to face him.

“I need to go. My mother will be expecting me early tonight.”

Melanie turned in place and took several steps up the hill. But she couldn’t bear to leave him like this, and after some moments had passed, twisted back to see her Will one last time.

“I hope we can meet again, someday. Under less painful circumstances than this.”

Then, silence.

And he was alone.

You wouldn’t think so, though, if you had been there. Yes, he was by himself—but the sounds of the world around him continued on without regard. The mood of the place, in fact, had hardly changed. This seemed to sooth his pain, or at the very least keep him distracted for a time. Ignoring his own mind, William leaned over onto the bank to drown out his thoughts in the overwhelming sound of rushing water. But this was futile—he knew it was futile. He could get lost in the rhythm of it, at least for a while. After some time alone with his thoughts, though, the intensity of them wore off enough that he could trust himself to mull them over. And so, pulling his weight from the ground, William allowed himself to feel. He looked around—up and down the treeline, and to the horizon beyond them—and felt another, more powerful wave of emotion surge through his heart.
The world around him was alive! Of course, he knew that this was true all along. At no point had it died—but for William, whose entire idea of this place was based around a set of now-sour memories from his youth, it seemed that the old brook couldn’t exist without Melanie laying in the grass beside it. And yet, there it was: there were the towering oaks, and the lonely birch tree with its stripping bark, carved over in words of youth; there were the songbirds on their branches, hopping along with a tune between them; there lay that fallen log across the water, peppered on every side with little white mushrooms—all the same, and all accounted for, without change or consideration. And there he was—just as he had been the day before—standing beside them, lost in a quiet daydream.