Sun and crescent moon with script on a thigh

The caterers at the Ashcombe reunion ran out of the good napkins by nine, so I've been writing this on the back of the seating plan. Mr Pryce is at table six, still calling everyone by their surname and still losing his glasses inside his own jacket. He asked after you. I said you were somewhere with better weather, which is true enough.

Do you remember the art block mural? The one we spent the whole of Year Eleven on, the sun on the left wall with its stippled rays, and the moon opposite that we were meant to make match. You did the moon. You took a school compass to every tile of it and filled the crescent with diamonds until Mrs Okafor said it looked like a cathedral window. I did the sun, and I got the rays wrong three times, so the shading went grey at the tips, and you gave up a whole lunch hour to fix them with a fine liner.

Nobody told us the council would paint the block over the summer we left. Tessa Lowe sent me a photo last month from the car park. The sun has gone, but the moon survived under the new magnolia, its dotted edge showing through like a watermark. Someone had also scrawled beneath it, in your handwriting, the words you used to put on every sketchbook cover: light up the darkness. I'd always assumed it was a lyric you never told me about.

I'm not asking you to come back for it. I only wanted you to know that the sun never managed much on its own. You were the one who kept me drawing when the rays wouldn't behave. I still have the strip of card you used to measure the arcs, folded into my purse. Write back, or don't, and I'll keep the seating plan.

Love, Ruth