Shattered Glass Epiphanies

So, I've made a decision. And suddenly, everything seems so clear now, like refocused vision, so concise, so obvious, so absolutely certain. It seems so...easy, now, that I'm amazed I never saw it before. That I never understood it. That I can barely comprehend that I once believed in them. Is this what growing up is like? Is this what growing old is like? I feel like I'm a hundred and I feel like I've just been born. Everything old is new, like glimmering figurines of glass. So real, yet so fake.

The oddest thing is happening, where I know I'm breaking, and I know what I'm falling, and I know that losing it, and I know that I should be concerned, but I'm not. I'm not, because it all *feels* right, and I'm suppose to trust my feelings. I'm suppose to trust my judgement. I'm suppose to make my own decisions. It's easy, when you think about, just a little step in the right direction, and you're falling, falling so fast, but you can catch yourself, you can learn to fly.

I know what I have to do, I know what I want to do, I know what I need to do, and it's all the same. Isn't that simple? Isn't that perfect? Isn't perfection idiotic? You can't obtain perfection, we're all damaged goods. It's what you make of the damage, it's what you put back together, it's what you manage to do with what you've got, what you make of yourself that makes you yourself. And that's so fucking simple. As a wise man once told me, it's your choices that make you who you are. I don't think he meant for me to take it this way. But just like then, it makes me less worried than I was. I'm not worried anymore at all. Nothing's muddled anymore, unclear. There's no black and white, but the grey isn't like fog wrapping itself around my mind now. It's become my mind now. Grey matter.

The words, a matter of communication, so easy to mean nothing at all. So possibly confusing, so absolutely impossible. A temporary solution to an everlasting issue. Nothing like the permanence of action. And if actions speak louder then words then what are the last pleading cries of a dying mother but background noise to the insanity of life? And if the world is insane, then should we not join it? I shouldn't be worried, there's nothing to worry about here.

Are you a man or a mouse? A lion or a snake? A hero? A villain? A god? Godless?

Back when I was young, before, long-before, when the Dursleys believed that they could siphon the oddness from me, rip the magic out--and I think they did rip something out, something that's finally caught up to me--they use to take me to church on Sunday mornings. It's the only new clothes they ever got me. Aunt Petunia would clean me up, though often she just shoved me in the bathroom and told me not to drown, and dress me, that was how I learned how things were suppose to go on properly, and march me off to Sunday school with Dudley. Sunday school was boring, and Dudley liked to entertain himself but seeing how to make me yelp or whimper or scream, but after that, we'd go to the big chapel, with the adults. Usually Dudley would start a screaming fit, and Petunia would have to take him outside, leaving me sitting on the end of the pew three spots away--Dudley took more than one seat even then--from Uncle Vernon. I couldn't tell you much of anything about what was said then, because I rarely listened.

Instead I sat and watched. First the people, the same faces week after week, until names went with faces, and behaviours went with names, and responses with behaviours. Then, after I had every face memorized, I watched the wide slit windows with pretty coloured glass and their patterns. This was before I had eye glasses, when I first saw them, so I could never make anything of the patterns except sharp lines and incomplete images. Still, I loved to watch them, as the sun moved in the sky the light would shift changing the patterns splayed against the walls.

Then, right at the end, before the Dursleys started leaving me in my cupboard while they disappeared three hours every Sunday morning, I got my glasses. Suddenly, the patterns, once like unformed thoughts, were clear. I didn't just see the colour in them, the vague outline of shape, I saw the stories in them, the work behind them. Each one was like a personal masterpiece to me. I think it was the first time I really thought anything was beautiful. It was the last beautiful thing I had for a long time.

Then Hogwarts. Hogwarts was majestic, and wonderful, and beautiful. It was a fantasy fulfillment. A living, breathing fairy tale, from one of those books I use to hear Aunt Petunia read to Dudley when we were little. Hogwarts was beauty incarnate to me, back then. Before I learned that stained glass windows have cracks, and fairy tales have wicked witches. Seems hopelessly naïve now, really. Everything has a catch. And you can't escape darkness, not without, not within. You can't not eat the poisoned apple, because then there wouldn't be a story, because then there wouldn't a be a point, because human curiosity is quiet and morbid and deadly.

I've given in to other fantasies now, to other wish-fulfillment, to other purposes. I've had conversations with the wicked witch and she seems reasonable. She seems reasonable even as she offers me another sort of apple, and I take it, because of another sort of curiosity. I take it, because I'm starving, and any fruit is better than fruitless enterprises. So, what if the ends do justify the means? What if the sorting hat was right? What if I was never meant to be the saviour, never meant to be the hero, and someone with silly expectations came along and cast me in a role that I would never have chosen for myself, not even in the deep, childhood fantasies. They cast me in the role of the son of James and Lily Potter, but Potters are dead, and there's nothing to be done of that. Nothing to do except avenge them. And after I do that, revenge my dead parents, the parents I never got to know, I *will* be just plain me. But, for the first time, it's clear, so very, very clear, that me is exactly what I was meant to be.