A Letter To You

Dear Nobody,

I’m nobody. I want to know you. What are you like? Who are you? Do you know who I am? I’m nobody. And I’m a scared nobody.

Love from,

Nobody

And there went my letter. My letter to nobody. I watched my owl float softly away out of the window, carrying the tiny scrap of parchment tied to its claw. That small bit of black against the bluish sky, shadowed by the Sun, low in the sky. I’m not sure if it’s morning or night. I’ve lost all sense of time, direction, and sanity.

I think I’m going crazy. No. I know I’ve gone crazy. Every bit of my mind screams with unintelligible thoughts all vying to be heard and then making no sense to me when they are. I can’t understand them and they’re in my head. They almost hurt in their effort to be heard and sometimes in the middle of a meal or a class or in my sleep, they’ll become so overpowering that I have to just grab my head and scream for all I’m worth. I scream until my throat goes raw and I can’t go on screaming anymore. Nobody dares put a Silencing Charm on me. They all think I’ve been possessed or that I’m a banshee or that some other horrible fate has overtaken me and they’re all afraid of ‘catching’ whatever I might have inside of me.

And so I scream my desperation at these whirling thoughts and then at those others. The ones who avoid me. They don’t make an effort to understand. So I scream to them. I’ll drag them down to the cold, raging pits of Hell and the flames when I go. To the burning pits of Hell. That’s how I imagined it to be. Cold burning. Because that’s the only thing I can imagine that could be worse than what I have now.

After I scream my throat raw, I start to fade away in darkness and the world seems to Dissapparate in front of my eyes. It’s not so much that I’m unconscious, but that I simply have lost all my senses for a period of time. It’s as if the world is pressing down around me and won’t let me go, not even if I choke to death of asphyxiation. And then when all the world has closed in so tightly around my throat and my eyes and all my senses are filled with darkness and I don’t think I’ll be able to stay alive for one more second and I can’t tell if I’m alive or dead; screaming or silent; awake or asleep or unconscious and the whole world is spinning around me and I can’t tell who I am or where I am or why I’m here and everything in all my perceptions that I do have is going faster and faster and faster into a dizzying blur and every bit of everything disappears so quickly before I can focus on it…I wake up.

I’m always in the Hospital Wing when I wake up these days. My attacks are so frequent that I can’t even remember what it’s like to sleep in my own bed - not that they would want me there anyway. I’ll be out so frequently that I won’t know what time of the day or night it is or which one. I don’t even know what month it is anymore.

And always when I wake up, he is there, keeping constant vigil at my bedside, waiting for me to wake. When I do and I see the dark circles under his eyes, I feel so confused and sad that I threaten to slip off again but he can tell when that’s about to happen. He takes my hand and strokes it softly and tells me it will all be alright and that he still loves me after all and that he can’t wait for me to become well. He talks of the flowers that he’s brought me and hardly notices what he’s doing to me. His being there is even worse than anything else. I don’t know why, but it is. Just to see him and to hear him say that he loves me so deeply beyond comprehension scares me worse than the attacks. Why? I can’t stand him there and I don’t love him anymore, if I ever did. I hate him. I hate him with a passion and when I tell him so, he laughs it off and tells me I’m just a bit crazed at the moment. But I won’t get better. Not till he leaves.

No one knows why these things happen to me. Except for me. I can tell when an attack is coming on because the memories start to flood my mind. Or maybe they’re premonitions or something worse. Whatever they are, they’re terrible. They are of pain and suffering and death and unhappiness, but an unhappiness that makes me cry just to think of it now. Of loneliness and lost love and everything else that has ever made me cry.

These visions come rushing into my head and then I can’t help it; I fall to my knees and grab my head as if to pull everything out, but to no avail. The visions become too powerful and the darkness overtakes me and everything hurts in my mind so badly that it runs together, incomprehensibly, and then the world goes black.

He doesn’t even try to understand what’s going on. He gave me a Pensieve once and expected me to be healed because of it. He can’t realize that these are not thoughts I can sort out by pulling them and picking them apart from another view. I need to plough through them as they are.

I don’t know how, but these thoughts and visions and attacks are his fault. He will betray me; I know it. I might be having fore visions of what will happen, or of what has happened or what is happening. I think he’s like that slime ball Peter. I always trusted him, and now he’s gone and done something so terrible that it’s not forgivable. He will betray me; I know he will. I trust him so much, or I did, but now I just can’t. He is in these visions and he is what causes the pain and suffering. Maybe he hopes to follow in the footsteps of Voldemort or Peter, and from the way I see things, he is doing a fine job. In these visions, I get a sense of indifference and selfishness that radiates from him like a storm. And I hate him for it.

I see him advancing on me, wand raised, red eyes to match his hair. He seems ready to kill me, and he will if I don’t get out of there soon. Why does he hate me so much? I pose him this question and he merely growls in response. When he does manage to spit something out, it is the worst thing I can imagine. That’s all I remember. I don’t even know what he says except that it is life-crushing.

After a while, the nurse shoos him out and I am able to stand. I usually go outside and stroll around the lake, hoping for someone or something, but nothing comes. No one ever does.

That night at the evening meal, my only two friends left in the world sit close next to me, one on either side and they are the only ones that do. One the redhead that so terrifies me and the other green-eyed that brings me down to a state of calm that can make my attacks stop dead in the middle. They talk little and the redhead tries to come after me, but I can’t be untrue to him and I brush him away. Instead, I rush outside to sit by the lake. I never told him directly, but I think he can guess that I won’t be coming back.

Behind me is a small footstep and a voice that I would recognize if I hadn’t spun around. It’s that one I would love to hold and cherish and give myself up to.

“He knows,” he says. “He’s desperate now, but I don’t know if he knows what’s going on anywhere. With you or his own emotions or anything. He’s lost and I can’t bring him back. But he knows you won’t come back. I’m sorry…I think.”

“I’m not. I didn’t mean to do it to him but there’s something wrong with him and I don’t love him. Never have like that, never will. I’m after what I can’t have.” I lay my head on his chest and just sob and he comforts me and, for the first time in months, I feel truly peaceful.

“Who says you can’t have it?” He looks me dead in the eyes, making me shiver, but not in the way that the redhead does, and I know what’s coming. The thing I’ve been dreaming about for my entire life. Now that it’s here, I’m not sure if I want it to be over so quickly, but it starts and changes everything. I can feel his warmth so close on my arms and lips and I lean in to it. “I’m nobody, too,” he whispers. From then on, he was mine.

The visions still terrorize me nightly and I know they will until it happens, whatever it is that ‘they’ are. Sanity is a long time coming. But the redhead is always in them. He’s in my nightmares and in my life, too. But not so much anymore as he used to be. He can’t handle me and my green-eyed hero together and we know he’s distancing himself from us. We’re just afraid that he might go too far and not come back. He won’t eat with us, talk to us except when he has to, won’t even enjoy himself when we go on trips. Everyone’s still afraid of me and because of how close we are, they’re afraid of my green-eyes too. So all we have is each other.

But our redhead isn’t doing any better. We can tolerate loneliness as long as we have each other. He has no one. And it seems he doesn’t want anyone. We tried to forego that hate and move closer to him, but he doesn’t seem to want us back. We’d be willing to apologize, even, for something we couldn’t control if it would bring him back. But it won’t. He just glares at us with the same contempt and hatred as always and then averts his gaze as if we are too terrible a scene to be looked at. And that won’t be when we’re doing anything! Just sitting, making idle chatter, and hoping against all hope that he might come back. But nothing comes. No one ever does.

He never showed up at our wedding and it was rumored that he had sunk beyond anyone’s capabilities to bring him back from the dark. We don’t know what actually pushed him over the edge. We just know that somewhere between here and there, he reached a point of no return. He left one day and we didn’t hear of him for several years. When we finally did get word, it was that he was after us. We shouldn’t know why, but we did. We couldn’t help who we fell in love with.

When Dumbledore came that day, he looked at our happy house, our happy life together, and then at the facts. He was coming. The redhead was coming to kill us. Dumbledore had just one thing to say. “It’s Lily and James all over,” he muttered. Neither of us was sure if we were supposed to hear him say that, but hear we did and it was the truth.

And now he’s come. I won’t run screaming from a friend and neither will my green-eyes. He’s come finally to get us, after all we trusted him for, and he’s come to end everything that we had set up.

I see him coming closer and, for once, he’s actually there. It’s not just a vision. Suddenly, the green-eyed face that I gave my life to is gone in the same green light that his predecessors were gone in. That power that can only kill him off because of his helplessness to fight against the once-loved.

As he advances on me, red eyes slit and full of hatred, wand raised, I ask him why.

His breath comes out in a hiss. “I gave myself to you and you refused me for that body of death at your feet. You never did love me. It was an act and I won’t be fooled again.” And as his lips start to move, muttering the curse, I am almost hoping for it to all be over with, though I have spent my entire life running from it. Or, at least, the life that matters.

Then I know what it feels like to have that unstoppable green light rushing at me; know what it feels like to have the life sucked out of me; know how it feels to not feel anymore. Or care, for that matter. For a moment, I frantically scream internally for someone to come help me. Come save me. But nothing comes. No one ever does.