where did our eternity go?
We were just kids.
Kids, who met during a lunch break, said hello, ate in each other’s company and smiled. Kids who later started playing together, becoming best friends overtime. Two kids who just fell in a simple attraction of wants and needs called love.
They wanted each other later on, nothing but each other, not the money, not the future; yeah maybe a future, their, our future.
These kids, who we were, roamed the streets, laughed at stupid things and smiled at the new day unfolding and spent all day dancing and having a lot of fun. Who was going to think of parents, and scolding and eventual separation? Oh not us, no time to think of consequences. ‘Cause what we had time to think about was life together. How we would grow old together.
Together is a word we used a lot.
I thought about how we would hold hands when our skins would be ancient and wrinkly, how our children and our grandchildren would play at our feet, how I would always come home to find a warm, lovely dinner set on the table and basically you, a dazzling, worrying wife.
But you always thought about the hardships we were to face with a laugh lingering in the air, never serious yet never joking. I laughed at that, I used to laugh at that.
We never bothered much about our education, well most part of it. We struggled, but we got through, oh we definitely got through.
And we were happy. That’s what you always said, we were happy. Now that I think of it, happiness seemed to be within every action we did, every moment spent together. Whatever we had been planning, whatever we did, whatever we were going to go was going to be better, better than anything and everything.
A life spent together with a family in a beautiful bond of marriage, till we would die.
That sounds so… horrifying now. Till we would die, like a burden, like a prison. It contradicts ‘the beautiful bond of marriage’. But thinking otherwise, we were always contradictions to the real truth hidden behind doors, where we would always escape with what remained of our sanity.
I looked at the days that were to come when we had just first met. I think that’s what you always thought when you looked at me sadly and acted like you were okay.
I’m sorry for that.
But is it my fault? Is it really my fault? Was I the one who asked to you to sit down and have lunch with me? Was I the one who invited you to develop romantic feelings for me?
I regret it all now, every single thing. The first meeting, the first date, the first kiss, the proposal, the dance, the wedding, the days after it; all which symbolized our banes. How could have we known we would be each other’s downfalls?
Oh what had we known then? What could have we known? We were just kids. That’s what I told myself.
Kids without any knowledge of what’s right, what’s wrong, what was going wrong and what’s really going on. Two kids who were beautiful in the beginning, young, fresh, alive and amazing, but had to struggle growing up.
Growing was something I couldn’t do with you, no matter how much I tried. And after all of this has happened, I realized the actuality of the truth – I grew up much faster, much easily. And that’s the truth, I grew up. I don’t think you did, maybe you did, but I grew in a different direction.
I sometimes feel that different direction was closer to you.
I remember waking up many days in a row and smiling when I saw your state. The ‘The Adventures of Merlin’ flat on your stomach, your hair ruffled against the pillow put against the headboard of our bed, you thick-rimmed reading glasses falling of your face, your body in the tangle of blankets and sheets.
But now, nowadays, it’s like a burden to wake up. I don’t know why. I don’t if that’s because you’re there or, you’re not.
I didn’t know if I was nostalgic about old times and your old stupid face, I didn’t know if I hated smelling your perfectly made breakfast every day, I didn’t know if I missed you reading me ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’ with your alternative ending, where Merlin never saved Arthur and it was never sure if magic was ever unbanned in Camelot, for the umpteenth time, I didn’t know if I liked waking up all alone. I really didn’t know.
What I did know is that you knew the answers to these. In the end you understood it all.
Back then, we were two children who were scared yet so completely… obsessed with their fear itself… with love, an insane thing they didn’t understand the complexity of. Oh, it was just us, just us.
We did things that truly defined us; good things and bad things. Selfish things one did when they were madly in love with someone as beautiful as you, stuff daft old kids did. I never said you weren’t selfish either, you held onto me like I’d leave you the next day.
Nevertheless, you made me better, in a way I’d never be able to give thanks.
I reminisce about the moment I saw you for the first time, your gorgeous ginger hair getting into your eyes as you gave me a timid smile as if asking permission to sit down next to me, and I was besotted. Even now, the smile seemed to burn in my mind when I think of you.
Your beauty was extraordinary. I gave it up in the end. I didn’t want to be stuck in my childhood forever.
I always thought that whatever decision I made, whatever I was going to choose to do, that it wouldn’t hurt a lot, but I guess not. I was wrong, as always.
Long before giving you up, you would ask me the truth, the truth about our complexity. I used to always reply how much I loved you. And now, when you ask me about the truth, my mouth seems dry and parched and my voice is small.
You had a façade – I always knew that, but I could see through it and I saw your heart sink deeper every single time I blinked in that moment. It was heartbreaking, it was horrible.
But you’re still a kid. ‘Cause you broke down, you cried when I didn’t. Kids cry.
Hearing your violent sobs from inside the toilet and the clattering of items falling on the tiled floor, I felt bad. I felt really bad. But I couldn’t change it now, even if I wanted to.
We could’ve spent our eternity together but we didn’t. We fell in love when we were just kids. Oh stupid, silly old kids. Stuck to a screen of vast ‘love’ and endless hope and trust and faith and honestly, I wanted nothing of it, nothing with you in it.
So I gave you up.
Did I tell you your beauty was extraordinary? You were as radiant as the sun, you were the new day I woke up to and you were the best because you smiled like nothing ever happened. You smiled like you forgot you had a fit inside the toilet, you forgot all the fights we had every night, and you forgot how we mistreated each other so gravely. It was all a big façade for your true shattered self.
Once I took a long look at the place you used to sit in, your side of the bed, all the books you read, and I became numb for some reason. I kept telling myself that I was not going to be another Peter Pan stuck on his goner Wendy. Not ever, never. And that giving you up was the best thing I could have done for myself, for you.
And now that atleast twenty-five to a hundred years have passed, or more or less, or the eternity we had been promising to each other had long gone, I know why you never shouted or screamed or took hold of me and sent me back in time to fix all those tiny mistakes which was never and always bound to happen anyways.
It was because you still loved me. Even after everything, you still loved me.
You loved me so much that I could never be able to compare it to anything else. You never looked back at the wrongs and rights but you told me to look at the path in front, the path we could always try to go on, everything we could change and so much more than that. And you told me how everything would always turn out right in the end.
You didn’t just let me go without trying, you just didn’t. You held onto me, and you begged me to shut up and try.
I didn’t know how to try. I just didn’t.
After you left, after the last moments of your face turning around and walking out the door; I shut that door of my mind and I erased my pain away. I hid your memories, I ran away from them. But I couldn’t control myself; I couldn’t just take what I needed from it, what I needed from you. I couldn’t generate a new life from the burning pain.
I had lost everything, even the blur of the eternity we had been telling we’d spend together.
I think I’m finally admitting it now. I’m finally admitting that I loved you, and I never stopped loving you and that I never will.
But it’s a bit too late now, don’t you think?
I look back, back in the old days and I can’t remember. I don’t remember. All those memories are so faint, so blurred, a fast-forwarded motion picture which hurt so much. But whatever I could figure out, it was just a blur of an amazing life, an almost perfect life that I could never ever dream letting go.
I realize now. What happened to me?
So solitary, so cold, so dark, so lonely, so afraid, so everything. I became everything I didn’t want to be and everything I thought I would become later. After you left, I always had the chance to run up to you and tell you to take me back, which you would in a heartbeat, and kiss you like I did when you told me you liked me.
I think the three wars happened. I think the chaos and the death and the misery broke me, seeing the Muggle kind die, seeing my people die, seeing my friends die, and seeing you die. Right when I was going to redeem you back, tell you I love you, send you a card and a daisy flower bouquet, you died.
I waited too long. Your last days were like the sand in a time glass, slipping through the gaps in my hands. I couldn’t catch it, I couldn’t hold onto it.
And did you know?
We were just two kids who fell in love.
I never grew up, because I was stuck. Stuck in a reality where I was nothing without you, nothing without what we had. I was so… selfish, I was my own downfall.
I would always like to think, to dream that you and I were perfect. And we spent our eternity together rather than a place of heartbreak and failure. Or, if it wasn’t with me, I would like to see you happy, where you existed at least, and got married, had beautiful children and had your dream house. And everything was perfect, everything became perfect. But it’s all just the stuff of dreams.
I was still a kid, ‘cause I dreamt. I would always be a kid, but you grew up – because now you’re gone.
I still think you were the only one who understood me for what I really was. You understood who I was and what I wanted, and you learned to love me from afar and somehow one day you died. You left me behind, you grew up without me. You grew old without me.
You grew old without me.
And now I think, where did our eternity go? It went where when we were just kids.
And we were just kids when it all first happened. We were just kids when we fell in love. We were just kids who fell in love. We were just kids.
A/N: Hello! New one-shot after such a long time? And angsty? :D I’ve decided to make this my entry for the ‘When You Say Nothing At All’ challenge on the forums.
So I on a whim wrote this listening to Kids by MGMT and honestly I just was mind-baffled at the beauty of this. A broken relationship, a delusional self-blaming yet not blaming person who suffered at his own cost. I hope you understand who this man really is. And I would also like to add that this takes place many, many years after they got married, after she died due to the war (First Wizarding War, I say).
And as a question to my readers, to know how well I can write characters (should know my potential for my first term Language exam!) I want you to tell me from reading this: who is this man?
Think of both of them as whoever you want to think them as, oc or canonical ship or not, I had no one specific in mind. Partly because I was thinking of a previous challenge I was supposed to be working on, where you couldn’t reveal who the characters were. I really can’t believe what I wrote, wow. Author’s imagination kicking in? LOL not, the epicness of the song Kids, which in the end the thanks goes to my sister for making me listen to it.
But here comes my disclaimer! This is non-profit and I don’t own the song Kids, this is a work of fiction and is my idea and plot, the only thing I think I own here. Oh gosh, this disclaimer feels wrong.
But anyways! Happy new year everyone! Please leave a review; I’d love to know your thoughts on this C:
-Tawi
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