Noah had always believed that silence was an empty thing.
Before, he had thought of it as nothing more than the space left behind when conversations ended, the quiet that settled over a room after everyone had gone home, or the stillness of a city in the middle of the night.
He had never imagined that silence could have a presence of its own, that it could follow a person from room to room and sit beside them like an unwanted guest.
He had never known that silence could be so loud.
A year had passed, and Noah still hadn’t learned how to live with it.
The apartment was dark except for the faint yellow light coming from the kitchen and the pale glow of the city beyond the windows.
Noah stood in front of the glass with a mug of coffee growing cold between his hands, although he had stopped drinking it a long time ago.
Outside, the streets were almost empty.
A car passed somewhere below, its headlights briefly cutting through the darkness before disappearing around a corner, and Noah watched it until the light was gone.
Then he looked up.
The sky was clear that night.
There were more stars than usual, or perhaps Noah had simply started noticing them more after everything happened.
He couldn’t remember exactly when looking at the sky had become a habit.
Maybe it had begun during the first few weeks, when sleep refused to come and the only thing he could do was stand by the window until morning.
Maybe it had started even earlier, years ago, when another person had taught him that some things became more beautiful simply because you shared them with someone else.
Everything seemed to lead back to him eventually.
Noah tilted his head toward the stars and felt something familiar tighten inside his chest.
The pain had changed during the past year.
In the beginning, it had been sharp enough to take his breath away.
It had followed him everywhere, turning ordinary moments into unbearable reminders of everything he had lost.
A second toothbrush.
An extra chair at the table.
A song playing in a café.
Someone laughing on the street with the same warmth Noah had spent months trying desperately not to forget.
Now the pain was quieter, but quieter didn’t mean easier.
It had settled somewhere deep inside him and made a home there.
“God, I miss you every single day,” Noah whispered.
The words barely existed outside his own mouth.
His apartment was too quiet to hold them, and the darkness beyond the window gave him nothing in return.
Still, he continued looking upward, searching through thousands of distant lights as though one of them might somehow belong to the person he was missing.
“And now you’re so far away,” he said, his voice breaking slightly on the last word.
He looked down at his reflection in the window, at the tired face staring back at him, and for a second he almost laughed at himself.
“‘Cause I don’t know how to love someone else.”
He waited.
It was ridiculous, and Noah knew it.
He knew there was no reason to wait, no reason to listen to the silence as though it might suddenly answer him.
Yet some part of him still expected to hear a familiar voice behind him.
He expected footsteps in the hallway, a tired laugh, an arm slipping around his waist while someone complained that he was being too dramatic.
Nothing happened.
The apartment remained silent.
Noah swallowed and looked back at the sky.
“So far away,” he murmured.
The phrase had once made him smile.
Now it hurt.
He had not always understood why Elias liked those words so much.
Somewhere far away.
It had sounded vague and almost childish, like the kind of answer someone gave when they didn’t really know what they wanted.
But Elias had always been fascinated by places he had never seen.
He had wanted roads without destinations, unfamiliar cities, oceans that looked different from the ones they knew.
He had wanted to disappear into the world for a while and see what existed beyond everything familiar.
Noah had wanted to go with him.
He still remembered that much.
The memory came without warning, warm and bright against the darkness surrounding him.
For a brief second, Noah could almost see the two of them younger, walking somewhere beneath an orange evening sky.
He could hear laughter.
He could feel someone bumping their shoulder against his.
Then it disappeared.
Noah closed his eyes.
A year had passed, but his memories had become strange things.
Some were painfully clear.
He remembered the exact sound of Elias laughing when something genuinely amused him.
He remembered the way he used to steal food from Noah’s plate and then deny it even when the evidence was still in his hand.
He remembered the silver ring Elias wore on his right hand for years, even though Noah couldn’t remember where it had come from.
Other memories were missing pieces.
There were moments Noah knew had existed but could no longer reach.
Sometimes he would remember a conversation and suddenly lose the middle of it.
Sometimes he would look at a photograph and know exactly when it had been taken but be unable to remember what happened before or after.
His mind had become a house with locked rooms, and Noah was beginning to realize that he was afraid of finding the keys.
He finally stepped away from the window and carried his untouched coffee toward the kitchen.
He set the mug beside the sink and stood there for a moment, staring at the small photograph attached to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a star.
Two boys were sitting on a hill.
The picture had been taken from behind them, so neither face was visible.
They sat close enough that their shoulders touched, and the city lights stretched beneath them like fallen stars.
Noah knew exactly who they were without needing to see their faces.
His hand moved toward the photograph.
He stopped before touching it.
Sometimes touching things made them feel too real.
He went to bed shortly after that, although he knew sleep would not come easily.
It rarely did.
Noah lay on his back and stared at the ceiling while rain slowly began tapping against the window.
The sound should have been comforting.
Instead, it made something inside him tense.
He closed his eyes.
For a while, there was nothing.
Then the nightmare found him.
At first, Noah didn’t understand that he was dreaming.
He heard rain before he saw anything else, heavy and violent against glass.
The sound surrounded him.
Somewhere nearby, an engine was running, low and constant beneath the noise of the storm, and Noah became aware of movement before he became aware of his own body.
He was sitting down.
No.
He was in a car.
His heart began beating faster.
The world around him remained blurred, distorted by darkness and passing lights.
Noah tried to look through the window, but rain covered the glass so heavily that everything beyond it had become a smear of black and white.
He turned his head.
Someone was beside him.
Noah couldn’t see their face.
“Elias?”
The figure didn’t answer.
The car continued moving.
Too fast.
Noah felt it before he understood it.
His body seemed to know something his mind had forgotten.
Panic rose through him with such sudden force that he reached for the door, but his hand wouldn’t move properly.
“Elias, wait.”
The person beside him turned slightly.
Noah still couldn’t see his face.
Then a voice spoke through the darkness.
“Noah.”
The sound of it made his blood run cold.
“Noah, look at me.”
He tried.
He really tried.
But the road suddenly appeared in front of him, wet asphalt reflecting the headlights, the trees at the side of the road rushing past too quickly, the entire world moving toward something Noah could not see.
“Noah!”
The scream came first.
The impact came second.
There was the sound of metal twisting, glass breaking, and something striking hard enough to make the world disappear.
Noah woke up gasping.
He sat upright so quickly that the room spun around him.
His hands gripped the sheets, his chest rising and falling with uneven breaths as he tried to remind himself where he was.
The bedroom was dark.
Rain was falling outside.
Noah stared toward the window.
His heart refused to slow down.
It was only a nightmare.
That was what he told himself every time.
Only a nightmare.
But the dreams had become more frequent during the past few months, and Noah no longer knew what frightened him more: the possibility that they meant nothing, or the possibility that they didn’t.
He looked beside him.
The other half of the bed was empty.
For some reason, that hurt more than the nightmare.
Noah pushed the blankets away and walked into the kitchen.
He didn’t bother turning on the lights.
He knew every corner of the apartment well enough to move through it in darkness, although he sometimes hated himself for knowing it that well.
There had been a time when he had shared this space with someone else.
A time when the apartment had been filled with music and laughter and arguments over things neither of them cared enough about to remember.
Now Noah could hear the refrigerator humming.
Nothing else.
He stopped in front of the photograph on the refrigerator again.
This time, when he looked at it, another memory surfaced.
It was not a nightmare.
It was sunlight.
A crowded hallway.
The sound of students talking over one another.
Noah was younger.
Seventeen, maybe.
He was late for something, and he remembered being annoyed about it, although the reason had long since disappeared from his mind.
Then he saw him.
A boy was sitting near the window outside a classroom, a book resting on his lap while everyone around him hurried somewhere else.
He looked completely detached from the noise, as though the chaos of the hallway belonged to another world entirely.
Noah had slowed down.
He hadn’t known why.
The boy looked up.
Their eyes met.
And for one brief, impossible moment, Noah remembered exactly how it had felt to see Elias for the first time.
Not as the person he loved.
Not as the person he had lost.
Just as a stranger.
A stranger with dark hair, a silver ring on his hand, and a face Noah had no way of knowing he would one day memorize.
“You’re in this class, right?”
Noah opened his eyes.
The memory disappeared, leaving him alone in the dark kitchen.
He looked once more at the photograph.
Then he whispered the name he had spent an entire year trying not to say too often, afraid that using it too much would somehow wear it away.
“Elias.”
Outside, the rain continued falling.
Above the clouds, hidden behind the storm, the stars were still there.
And somewhere in the past, Noah was seventeen years old again, late for class and completely unaware that the boy by the window was about to change everything.