Chapter Text
Are you aware, I wonder, of the way people speak about you? Awestruck and inspired, grateful to breathe the sacred air that comes from your lungs. Boys and girls alike kneel to kiss the tracks of your shoes, and you are oblivious to it all, and they are all oblivious to you. No one else has memorized the angle of your head as you tilt to scratch your neck, the way you squint at Potions recipes (despite your stupid spectacles, you still can’t see), the dents in your quills left by your incessant chewing. They don’t deserve to worship you, and I can acquiesce to the fact that neither do I- but yet here I remain, writing and hoping and dreaming.
I don’t know when it started, and I don’t know when it’ll end, this gormless infatuation. Merlin knows how long I’ve spent wishing for it to go away: the stabs of longing, the ache of your apathy. It’s sinful, truly, to want you so badly, so ardently. I want your eyes on me and me only, for you to forget the world you love so much simply to love me more. I’m horribly selfish, not to mention presumptuous, but perhaps that’s okay, for words that will only exist in a letter your golden hands will never touch.
Love can’t live on love alone- I’ve seen how it unfolds, I’m well aware of where that script leads. And though you crush a thousand hearts with your every footfall, I’m yet to decide which is worse: a glass shattered or hovering just above the precipice. A shattered glass has accepted and met its doom, but that which hovers gleams with an ounce of fatal hope, despite its crystallized fate. The pain of knowing, or the hopeless hoping?
Love can’t live on love alone, and so it seems I can’t live loving you silently in perpetuity. And so I taunt and I tease, drunk on the flash of your eyes and the clench of your jaw. Your presence alone is the dangerous fumes of a love potion, and I can’t be helped but to be drawn to its potency.
I wonder what you think about, when you stare out a window or at the ceiling before going to sleep. You’re an enigma to the world and we’re left with nothing but the spaces in between. I wonder what you think about, when you think about me (do I, in fact, appear in your mind?). In equal measures, I long for, and resent the answer.