Why...

Life is so different, now that Harry is gone. So...empty, so frail...I can't really describe these emotions that are rushing through my head and my heart.

It's not grief that I'm feeling. I haven't cried for him since that horrifying night...

Voldemort had come. He came for me, for Ron, for Mum and Dad...he came to kill us all, because he knew--he knew--that this was the only way to lure Harry out into the open. Dumbledore had created an almost impenetrable safe haven for Harry; Voldemort could not touch him at Hogwarts, but at the Burrow...

He had the perfect strategy, Tom did--or so he thought. He created a powerful curse...an incantation that literally ripped Lily's protection from Harry's skin.

Unfortunately for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, he didn't stop to consider the ramifications of such drastic, dark magic. Dumbledore had always said that if there was one thing Tom simply couldn't understand, it was love. The love that Lily had imbued on Harry rebounded on the one who had scarred his young face; Lord Voldemort could not possibly have predicted the results of such pure, selfless love, striking such a cold and self-consumed heart.

Tom died that night. He's gone forever...and so is Harry.

The days and weeks that followed were a blur of emotion and deep, painful cold. I felt my insides shut down...my very heart was numb, its beat slowed to a sort of dead monotony.

Denial consumed me. How could The Boy Who Lived be dead? I remembered the first day of my second year at Hogwarts. Harry passed out when the Dementor entered our cabin...but I was terrified too, more so than any of the others. It's because both Harry and I experienced evil in tangible ways the others could not possibly understand.

Harry and I shared a bond.

It was more, so much more than a childhood crush. It was more than physical love. I fell for him the day I met him--I'd yearned for him all my life, in the secret places of my heart. But what we shared, after our struggle in the Chamber: it's far too deep for words.

For many days, my very existence was caught up in an ebb and tide of perpetual tears and hollowness. Some people try to analyze the process of grief; for me, it happened all at once.

And then nothing.

I grieved then; but now, I'm barely present at all. The boy who had won my heart on that first day of school at Platform 9 ¾, who had charmed my life as he visited and revisited the Burrow so many times and then proceeded to save it from the wrath of the Heir of Slytherin...the boy with whom I shared my first kiss on Christmas morning of my sixteenth year...the man who died to save my family...I miss him, but his death brings more than loneliness to me.

It brings emptiness, for Harry was a deep, integral, relentless part of my soul.

I reflect on all of this, as I wander through the once-forbidden-forest...

And I wonder why...