Once More With Feeling

Prologue – I Miss You

I miss you
I miss your smile
and I still shed a tear
every once in a while
and even though it's different
now you're here somehow.
My heart won't let you go
and I need you to know.
I miss you.

I Miss You – Miley Cyrus

"Time heals what reason cannot" – Seneca, mid 1st Century, BC

Time passes swiftly, and quietly, so that its passage goes unnoticed – especially when you're busy. And boy was I busy. Or at least, I convinced myself that I was busy so that I almost didn't notice that more than five years had passed since I had last returned to my hometown to visit my mother and my little sister. I had briefly visited for her birth but had not seen my younger sister since, except in photos.

Almost.

In truth, I did notice but chose not to acknowledge that fact. Nor did I recognize the reasons why I left. It was too painful at first, but eventually as time healed the wounds I had both inflicted and had inflicted upon me, it just became habit. I had created a new life for myself in Boston with my grandparents over the past few years, and there was no point in remembering what was or was not back in South Carolina.

Having shunned Richard's efforts to get me into Yale, I had instead been accepted last-minute at Harvard, partly thanks to my grandfather dropping heavy reminders to his golfing buddy, the dean of Harvard's business school in Boston, about all the generous donations he had made to the school in the years since he himself had graduated from the school.

I had new friends – although no one could ever replace Mary-Alice, who was the only person from back home that I kept regular contact with other than my mother. I even chose to go by a new name, Rory – seeing as my grandmother insisted on referring to me as Aurora, I chose a nickname that I could tolerate from it… and besides, no one in Boston knew me as Silence, and that sort-of suited me. It was like, by ditching the name Silence, I could leave behind Silence's past, too, and create a new life for myself.

No one knew me as Silence, they knew me as Rory and liked me as Rory and didn't judge me on Silence's life. Silence's mistakes.

The freedom to re-create myself, while liberating, was also kind-of lonely, except for those brief calls home which only half-soothed the feeling because they were so short and bereft of true information. I didn't ask about Gabriel, and no one mentioned him. I didn't want to know if he had returned home, though I doubted he would have. He was like me in that respect, I thought, too proud to return to failure and misery.

At first I was too hurt to ask, and too angry to acknowledge that I cared, but eventually it became a point of proving I had moved on. But finally, miraculously, some eighteen months after I had left, I stopped longing to hear even a whisper of his name. I knew I still loved him, I could tell a part of me would always love him (though I would never acknowledge it out loud), but I thought I had at last moved on. I didn't crave him anymore with that soul-deep ache I had thought would never abate. But it did – it receded to a dull throb, then it eased to a minor, occasionally wistful twinge, and then, one day, it simply wasn't there.

I couldn't figure out if that made me more relieved or lonelier than before.

I had taken the letter Gabriel had written to me with me when I left, and had it hidden in the false bottom of my jewelry case, along with the engagement and wedding rings that Raoul had refused to accept back at the end of our oh-so stupid and short-lived marriage. The rings were on the very fine white-gold chain that Gabriel had given to me for the Formal, the gold metal of the rings resting either side of the pendant, a heart-shaped emerald set in white-gold.

I took them out from time to time, when I was feeling emotionally vulnerable. The jewelry was still in excellent condition despite being covered in a thin layer of dust for most of the time, and the envelope was creased and crumpled from being turned over and over in my hands – but I had never read it. There was a slight tear on the seal, where I had once resolved to read it after all, but chickened out at the last minute, and it was singed in one corner where I had once determined that if I wasn't going to read it, then I may as well destroy it. A second later, it caught alight; I stamped it out again, my heart racing a mile an hour.

They were the last vestiges of a life I never mentioned, a past I never acknowledged and a pain derived from a love that had once been so real that it had nearly broken me and all those around me.

I stood now, looking down at the few items in the bottom of my jewelry case, feeling none of the old anguish and pain, but a sort of detached nostalgia that told me I had finally, finally, moved on.

WORD COUNT: 846 words (1.75 pages)

A/N: Ok, I'm terribly sorry to all those who reviewed the first time around… but I felt that by the second chapter (which I never posted) I had written myself into a tight corner and I couldn't get out of it. That and I lost motivation after a friend of mine passed away in October, but I'm pushing past that now. I thank all of those people who gave their support to me through reviews on the poems I wrote for my friend in "L'adieu mon ami", all those wonderful reviews gave me the courage to continue to write through my pain and sadness.

Anywho, I hope that this new take will be refreshing. For those who failed to pick up on the minute changes in this chapter, or for those who are reading it for the first time around, or (no offence) for the extremely dense, here's a heads up:

It has been 5 years – rather than 3 years – since Silence (who we now must call Rory) has returned to her hometown in South Carolina. She returned briefly for her little sister's birth, but has since stuck to living near her grandparents in Hartford, Massachusetts. She hasn't had any relationships since Gabriel, though not for lack of offers... more for lack of interest. What happens next is anyone's guess (although, not really mine or Queai Kumosse's, as we know the plotline.)

MUCH THANKS TO Queai Kumosse FOR INSPIRING ME TO ONCE MORE PICK UP MY PEN… ERM, I MEAN OPEN UP MY WORD DOCUMENT… THANK YOU, FOR GIVING ME THE CREATIVE JUICES BACK, & FOR MORE OR LESS COMING UP WITH THE PLOT THAT LIES BEHIND Once More With Feeling!