I wonder what it would be like to take away that book, open your arms and crawl into them ? Maybe i could just disappear. To be absorbed into your skin, dishevelled robes, broken nose. Float through your blood. That would be freedom.
I watch him reading, his schoolboy elegance. Everything it seems, has changed, inverted, turned inside out. That fringe, years ago (six, to be precise) ruffled, feathery, too big for his small thin face and caught-in-the-headlight eyes now frames him perfectly. Falls straw grey over no-longer-big but nonetheless angelic eyes, knowing eyes. High cheek bones. The cut on his ear where i pushed him when we were 13. He still reads; but that too is different, no longer is it a haven from a world that has shunned him, but a welcome difference, a pace change from a world that would bend to his every whim. His frameless glasses slide down his nose and he pushes up the scuffed glass impatiently.
Everything about you is perfect, is bursting and budding and flowing out of you, in elegance and youthful impatience, because the world is yours, and how could it not be? You just need to touch the ground and flowers grow and you can make birds fly out of your mouth in song and even the worn heel of my father's disregarded shoe looks endlessly perfect on your feet.
I remember one time, we were 14 and he was scared. I remember how he crawled into my bed, as if I was protection from the storm, the malevolent waxing moon and the not-so-buried memories that he didn't want to see anymore. And I kicked and stole all the blankets and he just lay there, shivering, watching the storm, somewhere else. Everything, it seems, has changed now; because i am the small one, the scared one; anchorless, a catacomb of bitter memories and need and remembering how he kissed me for five galleons and I didn't care and i thought "I would rather be your whore than married to anyone else in the world" except he was the whore, and i pretended to wash my mouth out and he's not like that anyway.
And I just want to float away, to rip the book out of your arms and crawl into your musty wet earth smell and know every single hair on your chin and disappear inside your bloodstream.
"Remus?" I say
he looks up, that hair again with lights dancing on it
"Yes Sirius?"
"Bet 5 Galleons I can beat you in a game of chess."