Conversations with Darkness

I feel tired. So tired. Like I could sleep forever, if I wasn't wary of my dreams. Like maybe I could be Sleeping Beauty, pricked on the thorn of misfortune and fate and I can sleep forever, or until my Prince, Princess, Saviour comes to wake me with a kiss and true love and happily ever after. But there is no happily ever after anymore.

The darkness is winning. For the first time, I don't care. I don't care about the future; I've forgotten the past. The present is a collage of quiet surrealism. The darkness is winning and I want it to win. At least I know the darkness is real. Well, as real as anything ever is.

I'm freezing. I'm freezing so badly it feels like I'm burning alive. Like my veins are made of ice and my blood composed of fire. And my heart is grasped in cold refrain, freezing up, burning down. I think I might just burn away to nothing if I don't freeze to stone first. And still, the darkness is winning.

I was never the strong one you know; I just survived. Never the proud, just the resistant. Never the brave, just the determined. I was small and I was quiet and I lived in darkness. I couldn't understand the light. It never understood me either. For some reason, then, that never really bothered me. I was happy to stay in my darkness, to hide, to come up with grand fantasies of things that would never happen and places that would never exist. I was safe in the darkness and not in the light. Now, the darkness is winning, and I'm helping it win.

But I'm fighting it as well. I've been thrust into the light and called its champion. I'm not a champion at all; I'm not a child of the light. I want to crawl back into the darkness and curl up in the warmth that will cool my burning skin and bathe in its coolness that will warm my freezing self. I've never gotten what I want before, so I don't know why I'm surprised. I don't know why I'm surprised that I'm a saviour when I can't even save myself. I should be use to nothing making sense anymore. To nothing making sense ever. So, the darkness is winning, and I'm letting it win. So what?

Heroics never made sense, whether the hero wanted them or not. If he didn't then maybe he was like me, and if he did then I don't understand why. But I think...I think that maybe if I kill the monsters in the darkness, they won't be afraid of it any more and they'll let me crawl back into it and stay. Then, maybe I can sleep again and not wake up screaming, and I can have my thoughts again and they can be my own, not entranced by meaningless phrases of should do and must not and could have. Maybe I could just be me, just plain me, and no one, not even myself, will hate me for that anymore. Maybe...but maybe not.

Heroes are supposed to live and conquer and fade away as legends. They aren't supposed to live and survive and walk around with battle scars. They aren't supposed to destroy the things scurrying about like monsters in shadows because they want to claim the darkness for their own. Then again, I never claimed to be a hero. I never claimed to be anything. Well, nothing except myself, and they didn't want that. They didn't want me. They wanted their hero and their saviour and it didn't matter if he was a child. It didn't matter that he didn't want to do it. It didn't matter that he didn't want the light, just a better darkness. All that mattered was what they wanted and what they expected and what they *knew*, as if they knew anything. All that mattered was they couldn't lose again, even if it meant he lost himself. Even if I lost what little I ever had.

I want to hate them for it sometimes. I want to make them hate me. I want... I want...I don't know what I want. I've never been given the choice before. I never will, I don't think. I use to be okay with that, when I was in the darkness. So, maybe I want the darkness. But I'm not supposed to want that. I'm supposed to want the light to triumph, I'm supposed to want peace and love and happiness, I'm supposed to want, I don't know, hugs and puppies. I want to kick the damn puppies. Except, it's not the puppies' faults. I'm not exactly going to go around kicking teachers and other adults am I, though? Not if I'm sane...I like to think I'm still sane. Even when I wonder.

So, if I'm sane, which I think I am, then I can't blame my insanity. I can't say the voices made me do it, I can't say I snapped, and I can't say I wasn't rational. The only voice is my own. To snap you have to be breakable, and I won't break, I'll bend but nothing yet has shattered me, not completely, and nothing yet has snapped me, and nothing will. I am rational, I am rational and I am coherent and I am as certain as a fifteen-year-old is capable of being, though I feel like I'm a thousand sometimes, like I've already lived my life, once, twice, again and again. Like I have no way left to live and nothing left to give. But still, I'm rational. I'm in my right mind and it's conversing with my left, like a proper, reasonable person. So, I can't explain why I want to crawl back in the darkness and have conversations with the monsters. I can't explain why I want to destroy the light sometimes. I can't explain anything. Even though I'm sane. Sanity isn't all it's cracked up to be.

'It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.' It's funny--almost--that before the events of last year I never would have even thought to question whether that enemy, the one who most certainly has outposts in my head, was the darkness--or the light.

These thoughts, intermingled with quotes, keep coming and creating and convoluting.

Until recently, I thought I was someone I knew... The things I fear may all be imaginary. So, what I fear most is my imagination...I hope I can settle my internal conflicts without bloodshed... If you hide your real feelings for long enough, you may eventually forget what they are... I have nothing definite to apologize for: I'm just sorry about everything in general... Everything most people say makes some sense--that's why I'm so very confused...The best insurance against disappointment is never to depend too much on anyone.

I don't know how to escape them, when not thinking always seemed so simple before but now, now all I do is think and I can't shut it off. I feel as if my brain is cannibalizing itself to search out some semblance of normalcy: tearing into the soft flesh of my memories and the hard skin of my senses, devouring my reality whole and retching it up, rejecting it. Maybe insanity would be preferable, so I wouldn't be thinking anymore or I wouldn't know what it was I thought or I wouldn't understand that which I was thinking.

What am I thinking? I think I hate them. I think I want them to love me. I think they never will, not me, not Harry. That forever, when people look at me, they'll see a scar shaped like a lightening bolt and the son of James Potter and Harry Potter and The Boy Who Lived. They'll never just see Harry. So, maybe I can, should, become someone else. Someone who isn't Harry at all.

Or maybe I'm just tired. So very, very tired.