Who I became was not who I chose to be.

Life passed by too quickly, almost in stages. During the first part of my life, all I wanted to be the biggest, the best. It was a great life, full of money to spend and fulfilled desires. I had everything I wanted, and almost everything I ever dreamed. Nothing was unattainable, nothing at all. I think I could have demanded my own country and I somehow would have received it. But I never wanted quite that much.

It was idiotic, really, for me to assume that I would always enjoy life. Maybe I did have it too easy for those first sixteen years. I got used to things, used to having a nearly flawless life.

Life doesn't stay the same, I've come to realise. There was always that assumption that I would be a Death Eater, but it was never ireal/i. I never truly thought about it. Like what happens in a minute. You know what might happen just seconds away — you might be able to accurately predict — but the course could change before then. There was always that hope — that hope that my future would never come. Because I was happy, truly content.

Happiness is volatile. It might be terrible to say, but it's a feeling a person should never trust. What is happiness anyway? No other feeling goes away that quickly. It's strange, happiness. I'll never trust it again, like I once did.

My father went to Azkaban, and that was the beginning of the hell I'm now in. My family was important to me, probably more important than I ever let on. We were close, and ripping off one member of our small unit was enough to send my mother and I into depression. My father… gone. For all that I tried to hide it, it was unbearable.

There was one thing I was asked to do, and I had to do it. Become a Death Eater at sixteen. I knew I would have died if I had refused, but my family would have died also. So few people in the world mattered to me, that I hated to lose one to Azkaban, let alone both of them to death.

I agreed, and part of me doesn't regret it. I didn't have a choice — I iknow/i that I didn't have a choice. But the other part of me hates the idea that I signed my life away before it had truly begun.

I was young, and so naïve. I know that a part of me never had a chance to mature, because I was too busy enjoying the near-perfect life that I had. Being forced to change so quickly is unnatural and leaves invisible scars.

My life was forced on a path so different than the one I wanted, but I think the worst part was that the new path was always what I expected, but never thought of. It was always there, so clear — the only path, really. I couldn't dig out a strange path when one already existed. Especially because the other path would have so clearly been death.

Committing murder is superior to being killed. The more logical part of me knew that I could never kill Dumbledore, but I had to try. Without succeeding, I might as well have not chosen to become a Death Eater in the first place, since the end would be the same.

Death.

A small part of me not only wondered if I could kill the second-most powerful wizard alive, but also if I iwanted/i to. I couldn't help but consider that even though he was obviously a blood traitor — and therefore deserved to die — that I wasn't meant to kill him.

I think killing was too final for me to grasp fully at the time. Up until then, my life had been full of abstract perfection. I hated people because of what they were, not iwho/i they were. Who they were didn't matter in the slightest, because they represented something I hated.

Killing, however, is much more final. To kill you have to hate the person, not the idea… or at least that was what I thought at the time.

So there my life stood, at the beginning of the only path. I had no choice, truly, but that small part of me wished that I did.