Broken Bats of Hope
There is someone screaming.
It is a sound I have heard before, a sharp, piercing, raw sound. In this scream, there is pain and fear and a bitter aftertaste of insanity. It floats away from the body and flies free, beyond the darkness. I want to reach out for whoever is screaming; I want to touch them. Because I can know what they are feeling. I can feel it too, the scream that bubbles up in my chest and longs to escape.
There is a concrete wall in front of me, a concrete wall behind me, and a concrete wall on either side. I am surrounded by walls, surrounded by darkness.
The world is not all darkness. Somewhere out there, sunlight glints on a burbling brook. There are sticky-hot days to warm you. There are fireflies to light up the night. There is a moon. There are stars.
I think.
It's not a figment of my imagination, a shard of a hopeless dream. It exists. I've been there. Certainly. Probably.
Maybe.
When I get like this, when I begin to forget, I tell myself a story.
Once upon a time (that's what they always said), there was a princess. She was beautiful as the day was long (I would like to hold a day, no matter how long, in my hands. It's always dark here). Her name was Hermione (it's as good a name as any, right?). And she married a handsome prince and got to wear a long white dress and moved to a castle and lived happily ever after. (What a beautiful story…)
I don't tell myself about the wicked witch, or the bloodthirsty ogre, or the flaming dragon. The important thing is that it was all fine in the end. The important thing is that she lived happily ever after.
But this isn't real. This doesn't satisfy my need for the truth, my craving for a world of dewy grass and liquid sunbeams.
There is a knight coming towards me, dressed in shinning armour. He isn't my knight, but a knight. I can't see his face. He is offering me a bright red apple. I am entranced. It is so shinny, so alive, so fresh.
I would like an apple.
I'm not hungry. Hunger has passed me by long ago, and now I feel light and aerial. But I want to sink my teeth into the solid red flesh and hear the crunch. I want to taste the scent of apple orchards.
The knight is still there, waiting. I hold out my hands, wanting desperately to feel the smooth, slightly waxy apple surface beneath my fingers. He backs away. He wants something too.
He wants the real story.
So I share it with him, slicing it into paper-thin parts. We eat it together.
It begins like a fairytale, with an ordinary girl who found out she was a witch. She was whisked away to a castle where she learned about magic, where she made faithful friends, where she would fight evil with light. Life was one long summer day. Occasionally, a cloud would blot out the sun, but it would always come peeking out again the next day.
And then the girl fell in love.
The girl's love, my love, came like a violent spring storm. The sky was clear and blue one moment, then a rumble, then a flash of lightning, and the rain poured down. I didn't have a second's warning before my shirt was soaking wet, my sandals soggy.
Sometimes, it is hard to enjoy the rain. There are people that nag, that demand you pull on a raincoat, open up the umbrella. You might catch a cold, they tell you. You might get struck by lightning.
I ignored their warnings. I ignored the fact that my love was doomed from the start. Maybe I should have listened. Maybe if I had, I wouldn't be right here, right now. I wouldn't be locked up in this prison.
I should just give up. I should just kill myself right here, right now. It wouldn't be hard to cut the strings that bind me to life. Just a simple snip of the scissors, and I would fly away, beyond the walls, beyond the pain.
But hope keeps me grounded.
"Hope" is the thing with feathers…
A memory of a page, a memory of an idea.
My hope is more like a bat. A beautiful bat, inky black, fur reflecting shades of subtle tears, darkened mirrors, midnight kisses.
I never saw his dead body. I never saw a grave, a casket, his lifeless eyes. So I can only hope. That somewhere, wandering in the darkness, there is a lighthouse, a star making it's way towards me. I don't want to leave this world until I'm certain he's in the next.
If only I could find him. If only I could hold him one more time, for one golden moment. Then I could live in the darkness for an eternity, surviving on the memory of his warm breath, the scent of his skin.
The knight nods his helmet head, then slowly drifts away into the mist, leaving me alone. Always alone. The apple core lies at my feet, dry and brittle.
There is someone screaming.
That someone is me.
A/N: I don't know where that came from, I don't know if it makes sense. But thank you for reading and please review!
Disclaimer: JK Rowling owns Hermione, I own the rest. "'Hope' is the thing with feathers…" Is a quote from Emily Dickinson