These Corridors

 

I often find myself walking through the corridors late at night, retracing the steps I took on my more memorable journeys through Hogwarts.  The steps I find myself following most often are those that lead from Gryffindor Tower to the third-floor corridor, which is no longer out-of-bounds to students, but has not been used since the Philosopher’s Stone was hiding there.  Maybe these constant walks remind me of my childhood, when I was growing out of my young depression and into my more logical state of mind.  Or maybe there is something else, something that connects me to my youth but has made me separate from those long-past days.

I was given my teaching job after Dumbledore passed on, and McGonagall had taken his position.  But McGonagall is now beginning to grow old as well – her health has been deteriorating rapidly.  There was talk among the teachers of whom would replace her.  Snape was the deputy headmaster, but seemed rather reluctant to take on his own duties, and would most likely never concede to rising in position to become Headmaster.  Much talk has been ongoing about the job being passed on to me, but there is much that would likely prevent me from accepting.

There has been something about the halls that has scared me.  Though the students know me as “Know-It-All Granger”, it has seemed that there is much that I do not know, and I am not sure that I am willing to find out.  So much has become a grand mystery to me, and I have become scared about everything that is hidden.  I am scared of evil, and I am scared of what has happened to him.  To Harry.

It has been a long thirty years since I last saw him.  I have only forty-eight years, and some of the other professors think of me as being rather young, but not many.  All but two of my own teachers have left the premises of Hogwarts for retirement, and it has become lonely seeing no one that I knew before around me.  Parvati became the Divination teacher two or three years ago, but I have long had my differences with the not-so-predictable forms of magic.  Ron is busy with his family, and though there were touches of romance between us once, the few things we had were left alone, and my loneliness has just grown and prospered.

And in those thirty years, no one has known to where he disappeared.  Rumors of his whereabouts are much like those that once passed about the whereabouts of Voldemort, but they are just rumors and no one has worried themselves with finding him.  Oh, he had his uses once, many said, but he’s a grown man now.  He can surely support himself.

But there has been so much mystery about why he disappeared.  There was question that he died in fighting the Dark Lord, but none of the survivors of the war recall seeing him.  And there have been no leads on his whereabouts for the past ten years.  Leaving me as scared for his health as I am scared for the mysteries of the walls.  Neither the amount of books I’ve read in the library, nor the number of pages in Hogwarts: A History I have memorized, have helped me to cease these worries that occupy me.  What I would give for a sign that everything was all right and I did not have to worry any longer.

Ron, it seems, has been worried lately as well.  Though we had limited our correspondence to the annual holiday greetings, he has been sending me owls more and more often.  We have planned to meet each other soon, but the good that would come of it does not appear to me.  It does not seem worthwhile to me to have him interrupt his daily life just to meet with an old school friend.  And yet, something soothing has entered my mind knowing that he cares as well.  And I hope that whatever comes of our meeting, new leads will appear as well.

And this corridor.  It reminds me ever so distantly of our many escapades throughout the castle.  I remember that time when we landed on the Devil’s Snare and it took my creating a fire to escape.  And Ron’s trademark chess game – Hogwarts has not seen such a life-risking game since.  I have always been grateful for Harry’s Quidditch skills, and my own gift – the logic that was our only way to escape the chance of poisoning ourselves.

What has always entered my mind is the part that I always find myself walking the same path.  Never do I find myself in Myrtle’s bathroom, or anyway near the shrieking shack.  It’s always the same place, that first adventure that allowed me to believe that Ron and Harry were indeed my first real friends.

And maybe that’s why I’ve been so worried.  But with everything else, I hope that, even if no signs of death are found, we find at least Harry’s dead body.