The Boy With The Blank Stare: The Promise

Chapter Fifty Two: In Loving Memory

Overhead there were some speakers, and Kokichi seemed shocked by the music as if it was from a long-ago memory and mumbled something to himself about his headphones. Even though the music wasn't my personal taste and dated, it still made me smile despite the setting. 

Then I paid more attention to the guests, everyone from our class was there. Everyone who was still alive at the very least, even Harukawa though unlike the rest of the guests who dressed up slightly she was still in her school uniform.

The grief and pain of the loss still present within her. 

But it was more than just our classmates though, and Kokichi clearly realized to with the way he squeezed my hand tightly as if asking for more reassurance, and I tried to infuse some strength in him.

Here, was the red-headed father of Izumi. The one that had shared painful but bittersweet memories of his son with Kokichi just weeks prior, and the army that made up Sanyu's family, her mother exchanged a warm smile with me and a simple wave. Even my aunt was there, although she was dangerously close to the punch bowl my uncle, even more, surprising was beside her. It seemed whatever family DICE had was gathered here, as finally, someone took to the podium.

The podium was bigger than him, maybe that was a bad sign for his health, so he used a crate to not look as short. He didn't have any sort of fancy clothing, but he did have a white shirt likely from his school uniform and black pants. His hair had been tied back, I hadn't even realized it was long when I had met him, his face was still fresh with youth. The same youth in the photos of DICE.

Aito Danuja.

"Uhm...thank you for gathering here today..." he started causing a screech from the poorly set up sound system, Kokichi winced but I don't think it was from the microphone sound.

"You probably know who I am...I mean it was in the emails and invites...but uh, my name is Danuja Aito...and..." he started before taking a deep breath, "like everyone here today, I lost someone.

"I might have been just six years old when my brother died, he was fourteen. In a few years, I'll be older than my brother.

"I don't say this for pity, but I can't remember much about my brother anymore. And the memories I did have of him always made me sad growing up, so maybe it was on purpose or maybe just the way memories work, but slowly I forgot almost everything about him, I can't tell you for the life of me what his favorite color was, or a time where he laughed so hard milk came out his nose.

"What I can tell you though, is that I miss him.

"It's not logical, is it? To miss someone you don't even remember, to miss someone who has been gone for years, but when do feelings work on logic? We can try and reason our way out of every emotion, but our hearts don't care. They will grieve all the same, and they will soar when good times come even when we know better all the same.

"You all came here today because you also lost someone on that fateful day, a child, a sibling, a friend, or even just a classmate. Someone whose desk will never be filled, someone whose smile you will never see again, someone whose voice slowly fades away, and all of us were left with the broken pieces of a person that can never be rebuilt.

"And we all did a heinous crime all those years ago, because those memories hurt us, to remember the ones we lost meant we had to address the pain of that absence. But we couldn't accept the pain back then, so we chose to forget. We chose to forget our sorrow and by doing that, we forgot them and left them behind.

"But isn't that a disservice to them?

"How can we honor the happy memories and gifts they gave us by forcing ourselves to forget all the negative emotions? We feed off of those rare happy memories and nostalgia but chose to discard the rest, and by doing that we are actively insulting the memories of that person.