The poem is by Pablo Neruda, 'Sonnet VXIX'. Enjoy.
Perhaps not to be is to be without your being
She hums when she's doing her homework. He doesn't think she does it consciously, but just the softest of noises, it's there. He didn't notice the first time they were sprawled in his room studying. He didn't notice the second time either. Actually, he wonders if he ever really noticed.
Most every day, after things calmed down, that is, she would drive with him in the Jeep to his house. And they would do their homework in his room. They never really talked, they never needed to. Sometimes he asked her a question about his calculus homework, or she asked him about their AP Physics lab, but all conversations merely punctuated long and rambling stretches of silence.
Sometimes Lydia would play music; softly. Stiles would drum his pencil on a textbook not as softly. But he never noticed the humming.
Not once after almost three months of afternoons spent together studying.
Really, he didn't notice until some time after they started spending time together. It's on a Tuesday that Lydia stops at his locker after school. She has a doctors appointment, she tells him. She won't come over.
'Okay,' he says. Slings his backpack over his shoulder and nudges the creaky locker shut; squeezes her forearm lightly when he walks past her. See you, he says.
He drives home and parks the jeep. Unlocks the front door and announces to an empty house his arrival. He grabs something to eat from the kitchen and walks up to his room.
An hour later finds him seated on the floor with his work spread out around him, but something is off. Something is uncomfortable and wrong. It's nothing huge, but it's just enough that he hasn't actually accomplished much of anything since he's been home.
The silence, the lack of noise, buzzes all around him. The lack of anything is really very distracting. And this puzzles him, it does, because it's always quiet when he studies with Lydia. It's always been quiet, hasn't it?
And until he actually asks himself that, he had always thought that it was just quiet. But it wasn't.
When he thinks about it, really, really thinks about it, he can hear the soft and mellifluous hum coming from nowhere. But it's really coming from Lydia. Humming a constant, but barely noticeable tune, that had gone completely unrealized for so long.
Stiles sits back. He doesn't know what to think about that. Not that she hums, and not that he didn't notice, but that he feels almost naked without it. A weird kind of empty vulnerability.
He decides that he doesn't like it, but he doesn't know what to do about it.
He decides not to do anything.
The day after, a Wednesday, he goes to school and does all of the normal Wednesday things he usually does. He meets Scott before school starts to study a little bit last minute, but really talk about the most recent supernatural nuisance. He raises his eyebrows at Lydia when he walks past her on the way to Econ. She smirks at him. He eats lunch with Scott, and Isaac, and Allison, and Kira, and Lydia. It's all very normal.
But still, Stiles feels put off by it all.
It isn't until he and Lydia are sitting in his room, eating ice cream, as they do every Wednesday, that he finally gets it. He looks to his left, sideways at Lydia. And he sees her. And he watches her.
He watches her hold her ice cream cone in her hand, and he watches her tongue dart out from her mouth cautiously licking the ice cream, green tea and wasabi this time. She does this every week, chooses the most obscure flavor she can find on the board hanging over the wall, and makes Stiles pay for it. Stiles just gets a scoop of chocolate, which he will sacrifice when she, inevitably, hates the flavor she chooses.
It happens every week.
It happens every week.
And then, for some odd reason, Stiles mind brings out a dusty memory. He's young, nine or ten maybe, and it's the summertime. Summers were always Stiles favorite. He and Scott were more inseperable than usual. His mom would take him and Scott to the library, and they would spend the afternoon there.
Once, in the middle of a particularly torturous August, Scott showed him a book of poetry his mom liked to read to him. It was all in Spanish, but Scott translated it for him. Stiles didn't really understand much of it, even when it was in English, but he like the way the words flowed together.
There was no more than necessary, minimal, but that just made all the words the poet did use so much more important. There was one poem he liked more than the others; he had Scott read it to him more than once.
'Tal vez no ser es ser sin que tú seas'
He accidentally says it aloud.
'What,' Lydia looks at him, squints. 'You speak Spanish?'
'Oh, uh, not really?' He says, he doesn't want to explain himself.
'How do you not really speak a language?' She asks; raises an eyebrow.
'It was a poem Scott showed me once,' he runs a hand through his hair. 'When we were in grade school. Melissa would read it to him. Pablo Neruda, I think, Sonnet VXIX. It was always my favorite, I guess. I didn't even know I still knew it until now.'
Now, Stiles makes a point of looking anywhere but Lydia; his ice cream becomes interesting very suddenly.
'What does it mean?' Lydia takes her ice cream and switches it with his. She looks at him, waiting for an answer.
'Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,' Lydia looks up from Stiles' ice cream, question in her eyes.
'And, Because of love, you will, I will, we will come to be,' She recites; smiles. 'It's one of my favourites.'
They look at each other for a long time after that, neither one willing to break eye contact. They stay like that for a really long time.
But then a bead of ice cream drips onto Stiles' hand, and he looks down and licks it. Lydia bites her lip and laughs at the face he makes when he tastes it; it really is disgusting.
And when he looks up at her, something changes. It might have been Stiles. It might have been Lydia. Or it might have been something else entirely, but something changes. Because she puts her hand on his cheek and leans forward, and she kisses him. And he kisses her right back.
It could have been something big or important. It could have been life or death. But it isn't. Instead, it is all soft smiles and touches in the sunlit room.
And it feels like a love poem.
Y por amor seré, serás, seremos.