Once

    I loved him, once. For once, he personified beautiful purity, embodied perfection to distinguish my weaknesses. Once, he was the chase and the kill, the secret, the adrenaline rush you get from having and being a enigma.

    I have not thought about him for years. I have contented myself with pitiful remembrances of him, fading memories, and though I imagine that he still loves me, I know he does not. How could he? For I have changed even from what I consider myself to be, and I realize that he must be different in every aspect but one.

    He is mine.

    I am sure, I have convinced myself, that he has grown bitter in his years, hating me but perhaps loving someone else. I dream that he is with someone that is like I was once, to remind him of what we had.

    And thus, I lie to myself.

    I am sure that he is dark, mysterious, a closed book for strangers and even friends to wonder at. It suits my mind to think that he has shut himself down, abandoned hope. For he is betrayed, though perhaps it is merely what he does not know that makes him this way.

    I do not care to think of him as the same as he once was. For once, we were unimaginably close, and pain streams through my veins at the very thought of what we had.

    We had perfection.

*

    I refer to it as our childhood, though we were not mere children anymore. I refer to those years, our late school days and the four years of perfection that followed, as our childhood, because it was, in a way, like that. We learned. We spent six years in heaven, in each other’s arms, and though it has been twelve years since I, we, grew up, those times are still fresh in my mind. I have been left with only my most painful memories of him, and in a sense, these are the best.

    I remember holding hands with him, wandering across the grounds. These were the happy times, swinging from thick tree branches like young kids, our laughter intermixing. I remember his laughter, and each time it rang out for me to hear. He has a fresh laugh, harmonious, but I suspect it is as weathered as mine by now. Mine was never as light as his, but it came easily, rasping brassily, but to me it was fingernails on a chalkboard to his silver bells.

    More even than that, I remember the first kisses we shared, the first time we made love. It is a painful way to reminisce, only accessing good memories that can never be again. At this point, recollections of death, despair, crying, would be welcome, but instead I am haunted by my past. Our past.

    I have equally rending memories of the first time I saw him transform, and the last. Somehow, I have managed to keep these pained expressions of our friendship. I remember the time we snuck away from James and Peter, the stag and the rat, and ran like crazed animals. Just ran, for hours, until the sun had risen, and all that lay in front of me was pallid skin, torn in four long gashes and marred with hundreds of scratches. He oozed red wine, crimson life, but after seeing him at night, I could not see it as blood.

    The most prominent, and most painful, memory I have of him is the last time I saw him. He was standing at the front of the crowd, beautiful golden-brown eyes shining. I screamed to him, my voice like broken iron nails, and he just watched me, watched them wrench me away from the people and put me in the cage they had constructed for me. I tried to explain through the bars, but there are not enough moments in any day to fully make him understand.

    And then I fell silent, sitting in the center of my holding cell, and just watched him back. He was crying now, and I am almost ashamed to say that I recognized his very tears; fat, pitying tears, boiling and freezing at the same time. I let my own eyes meet his, and we watched each other until they Apparated me away, and I could see him no more.

*

    Now I am looking through a set of entirely different bars, though by all accounts they are the same. The thick iron obstructs my vision, but what is there to see, anyway? I can see nothing but pathetic concrete walls, and looking for too long with bring the dementors, though by now I feel nothing but coldness. They do not affect the memories I am left with, because while happy at first glance, they are more acerbic than you can know.

    At the opposite end of the cell is a window, a tiny window with bars running vertically and horizontally. But if I stand at it, I can just see out of it.

    But is there any use in that? For all I see is grey, grey rocks, grey water lapping at the shoreline, grey-cloaked dementors. There are hundreds of them, the outdoor duty dementors, and when I first came here, I could feel their effects from my cell.

    But now, I do not feel much at all. Days pass without the slightest trace of thought, though beneath my conscious, way past my subconscious, the cogs are turning. Once, I thought freely, but that was twelve years ago, and now only one thought resounds in the emptying chasms of my inner mind: escape.

    Once, I remembered him and all my moments with him, but now he is just pain.