Lost in Between

Standing and waiting for a stranger's help is one of the hardest jobs in the world. With your fate in someone else's hands, a person with no attachment to you except as a fellow human being and no reason to take time out of his day – just belief in your cause, your patience and faith in yourself may just be the only thing that keeps you sane – but then you crossed that line ages ago. As the world moves around you, you are stuck in a rut – to afraid to move, not strong enough to stand still. You are tied down by the gravity of your situation and frozen by the vastness of your task. After all time is money and you have just discovered your worth.

You face hatred, anger, ridicule, indifference, and hidden sympathy as you inch closer and closer to loss of faith – but then again you banished yourself. The deeper you go down the rabbit hole, the further that light at the end of the tunnel seems to disappear. Lost, fatigued and embattled your jump over the chasm of insanity is all but complete – this is war and you are three seventeen year olds playing at being soldiers.

In your last throw of the dice, you glance one last look through the tunnel and this time in the distance you see this one person stretching their hand towards you – congratu bloody lations out of nowhere you have found your very own Cheshire cat. With a maniacal grin stretched across his face and filled with cryptic references and hidden words of advice he offers to be your guide in this faithless world. And you lost, tired and embattled have no option but to take that hand, close your eyes and disappear – After all blind faith is something you have always been good at and RAB did survive the destruction of two horcruxes.

Following advice is never easy. Yet it forces you to do instead of just be. It gets you moving again, lighting fires along the way. From darkness you move to light, whatever little you manage to scrounge, as you feel hope licking at your edges. The initial wave of surprise is a welcome feeling further accentuated by the fact that you are on a path going somewhere – After all you were told to destroy seven impossible things before breakfast and you are finally getting started.

As you start ticking of points in your checklist, the light glows brighter trying to blind you with it's intensity, switching tactics at will to make you forget. In this hustle and rush your mind glosses over details as important facts slip through the gap and before you know it you have forgotten the one thing that matters – your Cheshire cat. Even the brains of your little group of three, a much much cosier number than seven, seems to feel the pressure of living life in limbo as her mind starts to go blank.

Manic grin in face it laughs at your stupidity, silently cackling as it manipulates your hurtling in the direction it wishes to choose – the subtle changes lost to you in the darkness. The puppet master after all prefers to work in the background, the darkness his shield and words his weapons.

Before you know it, you catch up with light, bursting out in the open, glowing with righteousness, ready to take on the world – after all the parts are dead only the body remains. As your eyes adjust to the light you realise with a sinking feeling that you are miles from your destination and the momentary hope that this is a good thing is quashed by the one simple fact that your friend , mentor and cat is standing on the other side, the grin in place – wider and more maniacal. And that's when you start to scream.