I Laugh At Mirrors

The last thing I remember is laughing.

Curious, isn't it, that we laugh at the things that we fear the most. Death. Azkaban. Surviving the reign of terror that was placed upon us as children. Perhaps laughter is our way of forgetting the horror that is an unknown entity seeping through our veins. I have laughed at my killer, at my jailer and at the world that surrounds me so that I can feel disconnected. Safe in my own little world.

I suppose I've got what I wanted. I am beyond safe now - one might call me immortal, except for the fact that I am not alive. I cannot say I am happy, nor that I am content...but likewise I cannot say that I am sad or regretful. I am with my friends again. We cannot talk to one another. We are all mutes here, nor do we have bodies to gesture with. Like mannequins we are simply being, waiting for someone to come along and dress us in drama or depressed feelings.

We jostle for position, trying to see out of our one window. Now we see the real world for what it is - Hell, Hell on earth, except now earth is Hell. It is a flaming inferno of prejudice, of torment and of death. We cannot die, we have the perfect existence. I have made it to the window, and now I see people outside of it, looking in at us. We do not need their pity, though they give it to us generously. It is they who need our pity, for they are wasting their time on the past when they should be helping improve their present so that the future might be brighter.

If I could feel emotions, I would be saddened by their lack of ambition. We have been given this wonderful world, and all we have done is destroy it. Life should not be a competition, but they have made it so. You may think me a hypocrite, seeing as I spent the majority of my life fighting the prejudice rather than ignoring it, as I should have. I see him, my beautiful Godson, out there in Hell. But he is not beautiful; he is a festering reminder of the failure that his parents and their parents made during their lives. He himself continues to make the world a living Hell, fighting what they call evil on behalf of what they call the good cause, the right way of living. There is no right and wrong way of living, but there are good and bad ways of living. Both their good and their evil have chosen the bad ways of living.

I laugh still, though it is hollow and meaningless. I create no sound with the creasing of my body, since I am not a physical entity any longer. I have ascended beyond it. The fact is, though, we rely on not our souls but our bodies for feeling and emotion. But you are all too stupid to realise this. I laugh at mirrors, for I see nothing, and I know that I have realised too late what my body was for. You look in mirrors and see a happy child, a sad child, a melancholy teen, a depressed adult. Your descent into madness is progressive but certain.

You worry about identity, when what you should worry about is preserving your emotions, your feelings, your opinions. Others will always view you in a certain way, no matter what your name is, how you present yourself, whether you are redeemed...I was not redeemed, people feared my name and no matter how I presented myself they would have always feared me. Sirius Black. That name struck fear into the hearts of normal people, and I did not do anything to promote this. Voldemort spends all his time trying to put fear into people, and yet I could accomplish that with greater ease than him.

I believe that he understands the importance of the body for the soul. We understand each other, now. That's not something I would have seen myself saying before entering here. I joined the clones in fearing him, though with more arrogance than most. There was a part of me with a dark desire to know what his power felt like...as a child I had always loved to play with fire, but with my maturity came a realisation that some things are best left untouched. Voldemort, on the other hand, remains trapped in his teenage mindset and will always keep his arrogance.

I like to think I had shed mine by the time of my coming here. Again I look to the window for confirmation, but I cannot fight my way through. The others, more restless than I, have excluded me. I used to want to disappear entirely, go to a place where no one could see me and no one could disturb me. I think other people felt the same way...they just wanted to be rid of me. Solitude was my haven, and reckless soliloquies my way of life. They didn't understand, no, they never understood. How could someone wish to be alone? To be alone was a terror, something that no human should have to endure. But I felt it constantly. Even if it only lingered in the back of my mind, I felt it.

Now I am truly there, in that place of solitude. I must no longer rely on my dreams to take me here. And even though on the other side of the window lies everything that my body ever loved and cherished, cared for or admired...I would not go back there for all the power in the world. Because I have seen what the body can do, fire and death and chaos...when it should be loving and caring and generous. Their existence is purely trivial; they do nothing for this world, this Hell, except to plunge it further into the depths of Lucifer's domain.

I laugh at mirrors, for I see nothing there anymore. It is the most blissful feeling of all...the one that I cannot feel.