One night, the moon disappeared.
It was strange, but what was even more bizarre was that nobody seemed to think that something was wrong.
The streetlamps provided enough light, they said. And nobody needed the moon, anyway.
Nobody except a girl named Aliah. For she loved the moon so dearly.
One night, as Aliah was crossing a bridge, she saw a boy lying down on the riverbed. He was alive but barely so. “Who are you?” asked the girl.“I’m the moon,” said the boy. The boy explained that it was his wish to become a human and now it was granted.
“Why?”
“Because I did not want to be lonely up there.”
Aliah then asked him what his plans were. Discovering that he had nowhere to go, she offered him companionship. Now, Aliah was not the type of person to easily trust others but for the boy, she made an exception.
For a few months, they lived together as friends.
The boy thought how strange it was that Aliah had nobody else in her home, while the rest of the village kids live with their parents. Aliah told him that she had been orphaned since she was very young. Her grandmother who had kept her had recently passed away.
And now, she was all alone.
“Don’t you feel lonely?” he asked her.
“I have memories of them with me. So when I feel lonely, I just think about it and it’s enough to make me happy.”
“Are memories enough?”
“It’s not. But better than nothing, right?” she told him.
He smiled. “I guess.”
The next morning, the boy had woken up early to ask Aliah to come with him to the foot of the mountain. There, he would bid farewell to her and return to the sky as the moon.
When Aliah asked him why, he simply told her,
“Because I’m not lonely anymore.”
“But when you go back up there, won’t you feel lonely again?”
“I won’t. I now have memories of us!”
“But are they enough?”
“They’re not. But better than nothing, right?” he told her.
Aliah smiled.
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MESSYPENS 