Title: Love, Defined
Author: xxForgotten
Pairing(s): HP/DM
Setting: Fifth year, Hogwarts.
Warning(s): Slash.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my currently stuck brain, and all that comes from it.
Summary: The school paper is asking for Valentines' Day submissions, and an anonymous someone decides to confess. Read on!
A/N: I'm back! I know I haven't updated in ages, but the past year's been insane. I just wanted to let you know that I haven't given up yet :) This isn't a oneshot, though it's hardly going to be anywhere near long either, and it's not as depressing as the others. Enjoy and review!
Some say love is a weakness. Some say love is pain. Some say love is a phantom, one which haunts the hearts of the world each night, scattering tears and scars like rain. I say love is a fool's game, one that none of us can run from. One that all of us are destined to play, and to lose.
Love is Morphine. Something that hurts too much to live without, but at the same time could easily kill with a sleight of hand.
It's staying up late at night, staring at the ceiling and wishing the empty space next to you was warm. It's searching the crowds for a familiar smile, one that constricts your throat and drags your heart into your mouth. One whose absence makes your heart pound in your ears in disappointment.
Love is the force which raises you up to the highest places of bliss... and throws you down like a broken rag doll. Love is irrational. It comes between the strangest people, and condemns their hearts forever.
Love is the perfect dream and the worst nightmare. Love is the light and the dark, all mixed together until all the lines are blurred and there's just no such thing as right or wrong anymore. Some say love surpasses all borders, that it overcomes everything in the end, as if it were some kind of Shakespearean fantasy. I say man created all barriers to limit themselves, because he was too much of a coward to take risks.
Love is the merciless jokester who laughs at the saddest tragedies.
I too am love, the witless fool who sits by the moonlit window with his quill, thinking of you.
What is it to love, or to be loved then? Is it a pair of welcoming arms waiting by the door? Is it an electrifying labyrinth of explosive feelings? Is it, quite simply, to care and to be cared for? Is love confined to decades of mornings of fixing ties, pouring teas, polite good mornings and pecks on the cheek? Is it a sweet white house nestled amongst others in a quiet suburban neighbourhood?
Here I must confess that I know little of love, or rather the different kinds of love, which is what drove me to submit this piece to the student paper when I saw the given topic. I was intrigued to try, and to discover how little I really knew. To me as a child, love was a wall of newspaper at the end of the table during breakfast each day. The word love itself was a taboo, a weapon used against the foolish. There was no love. Respect and admiration, but not love. Never love. Love was, in a million ways where I should never be, yet here I am today.
I have also read of love in various books, and I have heard of its symptoms. I hear we get all jumpy and skittery and butterflies magically appear within us. If you ask me, it sounds more like a caffeine overdose. Or a sugar coma.
The only kind of real love I have come across was not pleasant, but that is all that I will reveal of my love life, since I do not wish to revisit the past, and you probably have no interest in that whatsoever anyway.
I think that love is a far away myth, much like Neverland, or Santy Claus, or whatever other muggle fantasy- which only exists for those who believe in it. It gives up on those who give up on it, but it is never too late to jump back onto the train. Some of us rediscover love late in our years of life. Others never do.
And some- just a microscopic degree of the population- some don't ever stop believing.
I am not ashamed to admit that I never really did give up completely. I have never doubted of its existence, what with all the lovey dovey couples hiding in broom closets and whispering sweet nothings to each other on the towers all over the school. I doubt only if it will ever find its way to me. If I shall ever find someone whose broken heart has shards that fit mine. And, after that, if I will find room in my soul to contain such a thing which tried, over and over again, to break and to blind me.
I do not know why I am writing this down, and even less so why I should ever want the school to know this part of me. Perhaps it is the flickering candlelight that is making my perception blurry. The yellow, flickering candlelight which is throwing broken pieces of shadow on the walls.
I wonder what it feels like to find love. Do we feel an electric current passing through us as they say? Is it a devastating blow that leaves us fighting for air for the rest of our lives? Does it give us a crazed urge to grin like a mad person and spread largess around the world? Does it makes us feel invincible? Is it just a simple tingling, a timid glance and a bubbly feeling within our chests?
Or do we feel nothing at all- nothing but a warm compassion?
If this is love... what should everyone say if they ever found out I were in love with you?
Oh, but that would merely be my nonsensical rambling.
They shall never find out, and I shall never tell. Isn't that the beauty of love? The beauty, which has cost me nights of sleep, while I lay in bed like a lovelorn idiot, with you on my mind. And this does not count as love either, if I seem a little contradictory. Love is not love unless it is returned. Unrequited love is a dull ache, an emptiness, and a general pain in the ass. It cannot, and shall not be expressed in words of any higher class.
The ache is melting into a little puddle whenever I see your smile, and realizing that I'm still solidly there and looking like an idiot whenever you turn away. Emptiness is whenever you stare right through me, whatever I try to do to get your attention.
And you. You, my friend, are the pain in the ass.
You, with everything about you that makes me just about as eloquent as a hippogriff when you look at me. You, and everything you have that makes me feel so unworthy. You, and the way you tear my love apart. But that was hardly love, was it?
You, with how you make do unintelligent things I would never have done on a normal basis. Things I would have despised in my normal frame of sanity. You, who made me write this all out while depressed and fatigued and confused. Who made me reveal far, far too much about myself. Who is making this less coherent by the second.
You, who would never accept me.
And I, who would never be worthy.
Which is why I shall submit this to the student paper anonymously, to save myself the scarlet, burning shame of reality when this finally hits me. If it ever will.
For the better part of the night is now long gone, and the sun shall be appearing any second, illuminating me, the halfwit who is still drunk over the sparkle in your eyes, wishing you would be here to admire the sunrise beside me.