They Ask Me Why I Smile

They ask my why I smile. After all, I should be dealing with the pain, not pushing it aside. They wonder why I try to hide the pain by smiling. They just don't understand.

Some times they ask me why I even try. Why do I pretend to be happy when everyone, myself included, knows that inside I am nothing? The emptiness, I remind myself, won't swallow me. But it already has. My hollow eyes, my meaningless laugh, and everything I try to do reflects that one thing; his death.

Or maybe he's not dead, no one knows anymore. They seem to think I have moved on, because I pretend that I have. They don't know that I sleep on the floor because the bed has too many memories. They don't know that at night, when I hear the ghost of his voice, I talk to him, as though he is there. They don't know anything. They insist they do, but they couldn't possibly understand.

The hardest part is in not knowing whether he is alive or dead. If he's dead it'd be impossible for him to come back to me, but if he's alive.... Well, I can't make up his mind for him. Nobody really understood us anyway; they just all pretended they did. And now...now that he's gone, they just pretend that they've been my friends all along, that they know me. But they don't. They don't know a thing about me, or about him.

If there was one thing we knew about each other, it was that we we're the only one's that did know each other. And whether the world embraced us or pushed us aside it didn't matter, as long as it was us, together. But he is gone now, and I am either embraced or pushed aside on my own.

The bedroom is so hollow, empty, and cold. I swear sometimes, in the darkness, I feel his arms wrap around my frail body. But I know when I wake up the next morning it was just a dream. A dream that means nothing unless it is real, because nothing can replace him; not even his memory.

The war is still going on, and the casualties are piling up. So now he is nothing but a name on a list of many. Nothing to anyone in this world; but he was everything to me. I refuse to fight in the war, although it was all that used to matter to me and him. But now, it just seems worthless. Besides, who would want a stupid Slytherin fighting for the light-side anyway? That's what I always heard them whisper about me and him when they thought I couldn't hear them.

The sky is always grey anymore; whether with sorrow or in memory of his eyes, I'm not sure which. When I look at it I remember something he told me once, 'just wait for the sun to come through. Because one day it will, and it will be the most wonderful thing of all.' So I'll wait for the sun, and maybe, just maybe, it'll bring him. If he's still alive, because my heart hopes he's dead. It whispers to me in the cold of the night that that's the reason he's not coming back to me.

I curl back up on my spot on the cold floor and close my eyes. There are no tears, there never have been. I promised him before the war I would never cry; Slytherins don't cry. After all, we'd have to have feelings to cry. But then again, we'd have to have feelings to love. And I was certain that I loved him. Because I still do now, and you can't fall out of love. They just don't understand that. Because, no matter whom they loose, they still have someone else. But he was all I had, he was all I knew.

They ask my why I smile. They ask me all the time. And my only response is, 'it's the only thing I know how to do anymore.'