Silence. Pure, unadulterated silence. Not the type of silence where one can hear a pin drop. But the kind of silence that exists within the mind waiting for something to happen. As if you expect something to happen and the reality of the world falls dramatically short of your expectations. And you can choose to feel one of two ways. The first, you can pretend as if it never happened and feel utterly and completely silly for even attempting to bring about with your mind a delusion of grandeur to excite your own life and make it grander than it is. And the other choice is to feel the utter mediocrity that is your life and feel as if it is pressing down upon you in such a way as you make you gasp for air and wish with all your might that the world is not quite as bland as it seems. Indeed the simple division between the two choices is hope. Hope feeds the spark within yourself and helps keep that inner spark going so that you may find what you are searching for. And that you may find your own magic when the magic of everyday deserts you. So you may find the magic inside yourself that makes your life wonderful instead of taking it away from life itself. Adding to it is so much more rewarding.
However, Hermione did not have the luxury of such advice and as she sat on a log facing the lake beside Hogwarts she tried to hold back tears and failed miserably in the attempt. Her mind screamed within her. The thoughts jumbled all together so that one may not even understand the extent to what this above average girl felt and what solution may be made of the tangled web within her mind. She could not vent her sorrows in a constructive way. So, instead her mind went around and around in circles overtaking her normal clearly ordered pathways of intellect and collapsed in upon itself causing her to expel that mess in the only way that she knew how. She cried.
It started with a slight reddening of the eyes at first. It came from the intense staring concentration upon one odd fixed spot in the lake. And as the memories and thoughts became more painful those eyes started to well up with the salty substance of tears. And as the pressure increased within, so did the pressure of such salty liquid and it overflowed the wells of her eyes and slid down her face. And then as the rest of the body sought to reflect the inner self with the outer display it all went to hell. Her nose began to run, the sniffles caused phlegm to well up in her throat and she began to gag, forcing her to expel air through her mouth in a hiccupping sound and with the intake of more oxygen her vocal chords began to whine a high pitched sound. That sound turned from the quiet rather ordinary function of the body to a high keening pitch of a wail that pierced the area around Hermione and make almost an aura of sound that seemed to convalesce into a tangible thing so that all the birds within the area flew in retreat of the being making a horrible howling noise. However sound was not enough.
Her fingers clenched the log she sat upon, breaking one nail, scratching the flesh of the other hand. Her fingers hurt and reflexively she grabbed at her skirt and began pulling away at it. And somehow her fingers found her hair and began to pull in the most alarming fashion. She stood and stormed over to the lake and picking up stone, branch and whatever happened to come into her hand went sailing into the lake with rather unsatisfying plunk and plop sounds. Her hand brushed against a rather large branch and she sought to pull it from the ground with all her strength, but in the end the outer bark ripped from the branch forcing the girl to flail backwards and land unceremoniously on her behind causing her to wince in pain and cut the howling that had escaped her lips for the pasts few minutes.
She was tired. She was cold. She was slightly muddy and wet. She was upset and most of all she was heartbroken. She hated Ron Weasley with every fiber of her being and yet, and yet, she loved him with all her heart.