A little bumbling that's been floating around in my head. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I hold no rights to any of the Harry Potter franchise
A house can hold so many memories. Tragic stories that grip your heart and wring all tears from it, gleeful tales that make your brain fill with endorphins, and your heart flutter with joy, and unsettling parables that have you check under your bed and close your closet door for the monsters lurking in humanity's society.
Walls hold tell-tale echoes of long lost waltzes performed under moonlight skies, or desperate, eager young lovers consummating for the first time. If you listen to the air vents, you can hear the pleading voices of children as their fathers beat them, and the wails of broken wives crying out for help. If you put your ear to heavy oak doors, you may hear the cries of babies vying for attention, or the clumping of overly drunk senates and business owners.
Trailing fingers across wilted and faded wallpaper will reveal the anger of a teenager lashing themselves until their veins run dry, and they too crumple. Clearing dust and cobwebs from an old looking-glass will unveil a world unbeknownst to many, and will shed light on a young child's club, hidden away in a stuffy, much-too-warm attic for decades. Brushing off old costumes with cracking leather masks and bleached floral patterns will unfurl the nervousness of a young woman about to dance with her new lover.
Not only to houses show memories; they show also the familiar actions of the family that lives within them. They show the many signs from the hands of a child grown up in the home - the line of paint worn smooth opposite of the handrail on a swooping staircase, the words and drawings carved into the drywall from when the child was small, the name written in blue crayon on the underside of the dining room table, the wood creaking and worn-down on the trim of doors from a young body hanging by eight small fingertips, and the stickers placed on the light switches from a time too long ago to remember.
The worst thing in the world is to buy a house too new to not have memories of decades of use. It's akin to marrying a man who is suddenly amnesiac on your honeymoon. You spend the rest of your life wondering what you could've had, and missing something that was, in a way, never yours.
Houses are like people. You could spend years with your best friend, but to ask you to suddenly switch and spend years with another person is abrasive and horrible.
Such was the case with Harry Potter. 11 years old, 10 of those years spent in a cramped cupboard under the stairs, would give anything to go back to the comforting darkness and many spiders that crawled through the room. Instead he must stay in a room much too cluttered for his own use, and sleep in a bed that was never intended for his use. It was truly horrible, like cutting off the corners of a square to fit it into a round hole. There are gaps and confining areas that pinched and rubbed like a pair of ill-fitting boots.
Yet here he must stay, until the glue is torn off and he can live in a round hole again for the remainder of the year.