Chapter Five: Circles Around the Sun Two years had passed, but some things never left Arisol. Like the sound of Yuki’s laugh in her dreams, or the way poems still found her in the quiet moments between bells at school. But now, she wasn’t alone in the silence anymore. Somewhere between breaking and healing, she had found people who helped her stand again. There was Mina, her best friend since the start of high school—bright, unpredictable, always wearing mismatched earrings and way too much glitter. Mina didn’t push when Arisol was quiet, but she always knew when to pull her out of her head. “Earth to Arisol,” she’d say, snapping her fingers and shoving bubblegum at her. “No zoning out during lunch. You’re the backbone of this group, remember?” Then there was Ren, who always had a toothpick in his mouth and headphones on his neck, half-listening to the world. He teased everyone, especially Mina, but he treated Arisol like glass and steel all at once—respectful, careful, but never pitying. And Haru—quiet, observant, with charcoal-stained fingers and a sketchbook always tucked under one arm. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, it mattered. They sat in the same spot every day during lunch, beneath the trees near the school courtyard. It had become their little world, safe from the noise and pressure of everything else. Arisol laughed more now, not loudly—but real laughter. She wrote again, sometimes in secret, sometimes for class, and occasionally for Mina, who claimed her poems “tasted like honey and ghosts.” She still visited Yuki’s grave twice a year—his birthday, and the day he left. But she didn’t cry anymore. Instead, she whispered poems into the wind and walked away standing taller. Her grief hadn’t disappeared… it had simply grown a place to rest. What she didn’t know—couldn’t know—was that the calm wouldn’t last. That the sky she thought she had named would show its face again. That the boy she had mourned, dreamed of, and loved, would walk back into her life... pretending she meant nothing.
