Hourglass

Lily Potter can feel herself falling.

Not so long ago, of course, she was Lily Evans; but before that, she was nothing, an infinite speck in the gleam of her father's eye that night when he kissed her mother so gently and brought her deep red roses but left them on the train. Previously she had not been aware of that; but as she falls she can feel herself gaining new knowledge and understanding of the way she is, and why.

She can see a little red-haired baby being poked by a darker-haired sister and before that, flickers of a round-bellied, beaming flame-haired woman. She does not know who the woman is. It could be her, or her mother, or perhaps her grandmother before that. Harry and Lily and Diana, all woven together in a green silken patchwork that Lily is only now beginning to understand. Love is there as well, buckets and gallons of it, carefully stitched with gentle fingers that Lily can remember ghosting over her skin.

As she falls, Lily sees herself growing up. Young still, falling and dipping in a blue pinafore dress because pink doesn't go with red hair. She takes after her mother but her father picks her up under the arms and twirls her around anyway, breathless and full of infinite daddy strength and wisdom underneath a dappled summer sky. Huddling in a corner with her sister on the first day of primary school, scared and nervous and wanting her mother, but willing to try new things because she must learn to be a big girl after all.

Best friends: Susannah and Polly, the former laughing and chestnutty and dimpled and the latter red-cheeked and flaxen-haired. The first snow of junior school, year three, she's seven, perhaps eight, and the three girls hold hands and run around in a circle and hurl handfuls of frozen water at one another. Jack Frost'll get you tonight! they laugh at one another as they scurry home that evening, and Lily remembers the feeling of mitten-clad hands and the smell of drying navy-blue wool.

Shouting, arguments with her sister, I hate you, stop shouting, she's just jealous, Mummy, and please be quiet, girls, I've a terrible headache. And the atmosphere, frozen like glass between them on the brown velveteen sofa. The smell of new-old books, fresh from the library. Lily fills up her library ticket gleefully and reads of adventures and magic and she wishes for a life that is not her own, but then closes the book to return home. And she is safe and warm and cradled in her grandmother's warm lavender-scented embrace.

As Lily falls she remembers the taste of magic, bittersweet and fresh on her tongue like sherbet as she raises her arms and demands that her sister is quiet, only for Petunia to fall back clutching at her throat and mouthing silently. The letter arrives later that year, in a crackly yellowed parchment scroll, sealed with dripping red wax and smelling like the new-old books. It's from a man named Dumbledore, which reminds Lily of a bumblebee, and she remembers how a cat-woman turned up at her house and morphed from tabby to woman with the greatest of ease, like a trapeze artist, graceful and talented.

The train, the feel of her hands clenched in red velvet seats, sweaty and pale and sick-feeling with nerves. The annoying boys, one dusty-looking, one plumpish, one handsome and one messy-haired, that invade her carriage. She leaves, of course - and oh, how she could have changed her life at that moment! - and she meets a girl called Miranda with flamingly black hair that gleams like coal. Lily remembers how the snake hissed, burned and coiled on Miranda's forearm, but as she is falling there is no time to shiver.

They are sorted into the house of the lion, who stamps and throws his mane on the flag, and the annoying boys clatter up the staircase before Lily and Miranda can get up it but that's alright as they have four-poster beds and curtains and Miranda sits cross-legged inside Lily's drapes as they whisper late into the night and share chocolate with sticky fingers.

She learns to do magic, to create castles from dust with her hands and a slender stem of wood, and the annoying boys hum around her like sparkling dragonflies and there is the constant steady Miranda always by her side, introducing her gently to the magical world, and its hierarchies, and its guidelines. Lily remembers those hierarchies and remembers dreaming of tearing them down with her bared fingernails. She never did, of course, but oh, how she dreamed.

Lily plunges further and ties her thoughts together long enough to wonder if perhaps she is flying and not falling. Then she wonders if the two are different, really, and decides that it doesn't matter. She sees the messy-haired boy tentatively touch her hand and then feels how his cheek stings after she slaps him. Her first love with the messy-haired boy's best friend, the dusty-looking one, and he is her first kiss, tasting like raspberries and vanilla ice-cream.

And then there is danger, creeping in like thunderstorms. Students sometimes don't return after the holidays, and there are attacks on non-magical folk, and in the midst of a sticky summer among the enmity from her sister and the strange unknowing glances from Susannah and Polly, her mother is killed.

She gasps aloud as she falls, remembering the pain of loss and all the love that is in her soul stored up for her mother floating freefall through the universe because there is no warm woman left to centre it upon. How she returns to school with a black velvet tie around her ponytail and she breaks down crying on the shoulder of the dusty-looking boy who spends his life around books, and how he circles her back with warm palms and kisses her awkwardly in an irregular trail over her temples and chin and jawline. How he breaks up with her, sadly, later that term, and how she turns to the handsome one for solace. And how he fills her for a night, making her whole as she sobs into his shoulder and clings to his brown boyish chest and leaves toothmarks behind.

The anger afterwards, the red-hot fury that fills her from head to toe, making her tense up even as she falls. Miranda holds her afterwards as she sobs her frustration and humiliation away - how dare he, how could he, and why can't I regret it? And she works hard and toes the line and feels herself slowly crack apart.

Finally she is put back together by the messy-haired boy who cradles her and strokes her hair back with steady strong fingers, his strength like a lion's, protecting and golden-warm like the sun, and he's so much taller than her, and she curls up against his crescent like a sickle moon. Finally he makes love to her, slowly, gently, his body poetry and prose against her questing fingers, and she is hit by the sudden and beautiful knowledge that this, this is forever.

When school is over and the phoenix is burned into their shoulders, they set up home together; and she can remember that home so well, her first home, a small flat that smells like old books with soggy autumnal leaves clogging up the guttering. And he carries her in, cradled against his chest like a tiny precious china doll and she knows that she won't break. They fight evil together, sparks flashing from their wands in all colours of the rainbow, blinding, disabling, killing, and they stagger backwards together and have to catch hands as they look at what they have done, how the world is being slowly destroyed.

Lily falls, and white flowers fall with her, their scent enveloping her, and it is getting harder to remember it all. But she knows two boys, the dusty boy and the handsome boy, leaning on each other and stealing kisses when they think no one is watching, and how she and her Jamie were caught up again in the promise of new love. And the arguments, and the cold at night when he steals the bedcovers, and how he leaves sticky trails of marmalade on the kitchen table, and she loves him so dearly.

And he is with her, reminding her, keeping her whole and together like he always has done. She finds out that she's going to have a baby and tells him with butterflies pouring from her stomach out through her mouth and he yells and clasps her to him with joy, and the summer in which she is pregnant is long and beautiful and everlasting. She remembers a picnic in June in Regent's Park with light dappled onto his hair and her red print dress billowing in the breeze and the two boys thoroughly wrapped up in each other opposite from Lily and her messy-haired boy.

And this is just after their wedding, at the end of the springtime when she wears white even though she's not a virgin and they're showered in pink and blue and yellow and white and maybe it's stardust. And that is the last time she sees Miranda, who is found at the end of June with her beautiful black hair dusty and lank and some things, some people, some times, must be forgotten.

Her baby is born that summer after days of screaming and crying. He is perfect and that is the only word that can truly describe him, because he is her baby, her son, and she knows that she will never be quite the same again. She knows that she will never be quite free again, that she will always be tied down by fear for this tiny person, and she is glad.

For the next year she remembers that she moves between love and hatred and near-death. Love for Jamie and Harry and the boys, annoying as they are, hatred for those with the spiraling darkness of hissing snakes tattooed on the pale skin of their inner arms, near-death twice when she defies the Dark Lord with her husband and child. She gets hexed terribly, only wakes up a week later as Harry's tiny arms reach out for her and his clear eyes fill with tears.

Finally she remembers their death, terrifying and abrupt and yet triumphant as they are, and the way she hears Jamie's shouts downstairs and the terrible way they just end and the way she stops in the middle of laying Harry down to just listen for a moment, frozen in a sudden wave of complete and total agony, as if her heart has just been ripped out. and it is there that the memories end. She knows there are more but they are so terrible that she's evidently thrown them away to the wreaths of time that are surrounding her; her last image is of her baby's green eyes, staring up at her, and her last words dying on her lips, telling him that she loves him.

And now she is dissolving into silt and sand and dust, like specks floating through an hourglass, but this hour is long and everlasting and truer than any time she has known before. And there are atoms of Lily mixing with molecules of James and she can feel herself melting into his familiar warmth, fiery autumn leaves mixed with springtime's sweet flowers mixed with winter's flickering firelight and sticky summery kisses.

And one day Harry will join them, as is the way of the world, and Harry's children after him, and after that, she is not sure; she has been told, or someone she loves has, that death is but the next great adventure; and she is ready to meet it.