I can't resist the day
I didn't think it would end like this. This doesn't happen to me. I am smart. I am sensible. I don't do these things. I'm not that girl, I never have been.
Love is something I thought would come along someday in the very distant future; sedate, controllable and nice. I never imagined it would sweep me along before I knew it, lift me to dizzying highs beyond my imagination, dash me against the rocks and tear me to pieces, tilt my world about me and leave me gasping as it all settles in.
Love changes everything. It's not neat and well planned, the way it is in muggle movies, it's not the glory it is in poetry, or the fairytale it is in books. It is messy, it is hard, and it is more intense that anything I have experienced.
I don't know how it happened. It was summer, the last golden summer of innocence. I will always remember it as the summer my shields came crashing down, when the protective distance I kept up to safeguard my soul was lost, when I learned to love, and that once you step across the line between girl child and woman, when you close that garden gate behind you, you can never return.
Things are simpler in that world you leave behind you. You know you will love, that when you love you will know it for a certainty. You will love a handsome prince who will love you back, not your cousin, for love works both ways. He will not be torn, you will not be confused, you will not be plunged in the middle of a bitter war.
They asked me to come, to stay in that little bungalow in France, to keep the peace. I am, after all, the sensible one; wise, calm, placid little Rose, too interested in her books and her studies to ever look at a boy. Undersized, freckled, with the Weasely locks my Veela cousins disdained; I was no competition for their svelte hourglass figures, flawless ivory skin and gleaming golden hair, for their crystal laughs and secretive smiles. I could be depended on, I was safe, reliable and harmless. The one Hufflepuff in a family of Gryffindors and the odd Ravenclaw, I was nobody to take seriously.
It was the way it had always been. I tagged along on the outskirts of life, always watching as others lived and loved and danced through the days. I dreamed, and I thought, and I read, and I wished for something more. Some glorious future, some great destiny, some all consuming love. Anything, rather than being known as just another Weasely, or worse, Hermione Granger's disappointing, directionless daughter.
There was no where I could go to escape that label, my family's fame had spread all over the world as my cousins grew and flourished, spreading their wings and taking flight while I stayed landlocked, waiting, wishing and hoping for life to come along.
I lived that summer. Despite everything that happened, I savoured those days, which slipped through my fingers like precious stones, to lie sparkling and untarnished in the river of nostalgia. I felt more alive than I ever had before.
I loved. I was loved. It just was not as simple as the stories make it out.
It never is, though