Presence and Presents of Potter: Tears in the Mirror

Episode Two

I knew who they were before he did.

It wasn't a difficult puzzle. Red hair and tears in green eyes, black hair that stuck up in the back... I knew.

But when he realized, that line, that wall between him and myself... it dissolved. Vaporized, as though it had never been and never would be again.

They were there for the first time. These people who loved him, and therefore loved me, totally and without reserve. There were no toddlerhood hysterics to recall; no adolescent travesties to come between us. There was the love of two parents to their infant child, and the unbearable pain of the child, who was no longer an infant and was suddenly drowning in an ocean of colossal emotion. There were no complexities here, just that gasping sense of a flower given too much water all at once. Because... we were helpless, and helplessly alone. How to fit a love so huge into bodies so small? How to express this bruising gratitude, and give voice to the sudden, aching, unslakable lust for more? How were we to swallow this incredible pain that this love was now always... ever... trapped in a mirror?

My hands shivered on the pages, and aching, steady tears slowly washed my cheeks. The weakness of grief trickled through me, the friend of a foreign and familiar anguish like the pain of the sand, as it takes another tide.