Valentine's Day. God, how much I hate it. I've always been an odd number and today is a day for evens. Two four six eight ten. Two, and multiples thereof.
I suppose it's just bitterness talking. She's a great ventriloquist, she is. Hand up my back, making me speak whilst all the time hiding that she herself is the one the words are coming from. It's entertaining for others, so who cares about the dummy?
I hate this.
I went for a drink in Hogsmeade yesterday and found it to be synonymous with hell. Chocolates piled up on the display stands. Cupids preparing to deliver gifts and songs, love potions (or perhaps that should be 'love potions') bottled and balanced precariously in pyramids, everlasting roses tied up with white ribbon in the windows. Whatever happened to old fashioned love? They have it right in the muggle world. Love is not everlasting no matter how much you want it to be. The fire fades and then you have nothing.
But don't listen to bitter old single me.
Just because I fell in love and she didn't love me back doesn't mean love's a bad thing. Just because I'm not pretty enough or I didn't try hard enough. The old cynic's comments mean nothing today, when it's all about the people who found someone.
I found someone but she is like the ruby at the bottom of the river – unreachable, untouchable. She will never see me the way I see her. I see her from above the river and she from below. Water is a distortion. I watch her as she drowns but I am the one who has fallen and is being slowly suffocated under love's tides.
I will not deny I didn't think about sending her something but there is no real romance left when magic makes it all so predictable. There is no romance in true anonymity, is there?
I will not deny I didn't think about writing to her but my words are already twisted like my mind. I hold quill above paper and I feel like death. I hold quill above paper and I do not wish to evoke in her guilt, sorrow, hatred. There is no chance I would evoke in her love.
Picture this woman thinking sadness by a river at the bottom of a hill in Hogsmeade. I hear your thoughts. She's probably crazy. Probably old, twisted and single.
You're not far off. I think I am unlovable. There was one who loved me once but I could never love him. And now I am not who I was. Love changes people the way capitals change words.
I sit here and I shiver because it is cold. I know that seems obvious but my life is lacking in those things, those little pinpricks of certainty like stars.
I sit here and then I hear footsteps. I sit here and then someone is wrapping something round my shoulders and is asking questions and I can do nothing but stare ahead of me with tears falling as if I were in love.
When I force myself to turn I am looking into her eyes and then she is silent.
'Hermione,' I whisper, 'I think I'm going crazy.'
She says nothing but sits with her arm around me and her head resting on my shoulder. I look at her. She looks at me.
You know what happens next. That dissonant clash of minor versus major where the key is as uncertain as the knowledge you are reading music itself. In the sane tongue, we kissed.
She smiles as if she always knew. I try to grasp the name for this feeling, this new feeling that long faded from my memory. She rests her head on my shoulder again.
'Tonks,' she says smiling, 'What are you doing here?'
What am I doing here? I pause, and the silence stretches.
And then I laugh.
'I don't know,' I say, laughing, crying, snapping from melancholy madwoman to just woman, a woman, any woman, 'I honestly don't know.'
She finds my hand and holds it. Bitterness fades. Heartbreak, heartache fades. The words mad sad lost and drowning mean nothing here, now, wherever and whenever this is.
I forget, remember. Lines blur and things fall to greyscale. And now I believe in the word miracle.
And now I believe in the word love.
