In Silence and Tears

I never truly understood poetry until you came to me that night.

The nuances and subtle thrills of its lines had never hit me until I felt your breath against my cheek and heard you gasp lines of Shakespeare and Byron and Yeats in my ear as you reached your climax.

I would tease you about that afterwards as you lay draped across my chest. You tried to hide your blush, but I saw and smiled at the bookworm you were.

Now a song of Byron is always on my lips and in my heart, but its lines are different from the ones you whispered to me on that endless night. It speaks of a stranger kind of emotion.

You had suddenly grown colder to me. You had read the unasked question in my eyes and had answered by pulling away. You saw my nuances, read my every movement and gesture and understood them. You turned towards the words of hate I showered upon you in the day and hid from what you saw in my eyes at night.

It was too much for you.

When you stopped coming to me, I knew what you were too scared to tell me.

A Gryffindor shouldn't be scared of anything.

But you were. Scared of being caught, or of what might happen, or of what you might feel.

I embraced the poetry in our embraces. You retreated from the rhythm pulsing through us and wrapped yourself in solid prose.

That last day I approached you, and I saw you grow pale. You detached yourself from your friends, and I noted in the back of my mind that you looked like a sonnet in your graduation robes.

I tried to touch your cheek, and you pulled away just as I felt the dampness staining it. You didn't say anything. No lines of Yeats, no Eliot, no Tennyson. You offered me silence, and I took it, memorizing the sight of your lips as I fought not to taste them.

I see you from time to time now. You no longer look like poetry. You look beautiful, as always, but there is grounding and a reality about you that wasn't there before. The dreamy look in your eye has disappeared and has been replaced with cynicism. I can guarantee that you never again will recite poems as you reach ecstasy, if you ever again feel it.

I don't understand why, in the end, it was the cold one who was strong enough to face our music and revel in it, while you, my poetic dreamer, retreated into pragmatism and sarcasm.

But I will never relinquish the words now rushing through my veins. I will never again fear to taste instead of merely gaze and memorize. I no longer mask myself in hate, but instead let the poetry of my eyes stare anyone in the face.

The poems remain forever on my lips, and I write odes to you, sonnets to your beauty and to the poet I once saw in your eyes.

When we two parted

In silence and tears,

Half broken-hearted

To sever for years,

Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

Colder thy kiss;

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this.

In secret we met –

In silence I grieve

That thy heart could forget,

Thy spirit deceive.

If I should meet thee

After long years.

How should I greet thee? –

With silence and tears.

-Lord Byron