Tied Together With a Smile
I slid down the side of the bathroom stall.
Tears running down my face, I tried to hold back. I couldn't.
It always happened like this. I always let this be my weakness, this love. This soul breaking, heart wrenching, horrible love for a boy that would never love me back. I always let him break me. He was the one person that had that power, a power I wish no one had.
I tried to forget about him with others. And, for a while, it worked. But in the long run, I knew that there was only one person that would be able to fill that gaping hole in my heart. The only boy that didn't seem to want me. The only boy that I wanted was the only one I couldn't have.
And if this wasn't enough, lets add in the war that everyone knew was coming. The war I knew we'd be a part of. The war I knew my family and I would play a large part in.
It all seemed to pile up. All the feelings. All the stress. Every time I tried to organize myself something else would be thrown into the never ending emotional train wreck that was my life. I had to find a way to cope. And eventually, after a fair few years of suffering, I did.
I couldn't help what I did. Most of the time, I didn't even think about it. I didn't plan it out. It had been like this for a while. I had my good days and my bad. My weak and my strong.
But even on my strong days I could feel it. The feeling of unworthiness just a layer under the feelings I would acknowledge. I could only handle so much. I wasn't strong, I wasn't brave. Not like everyone else thought I was, anyway. I wasn't the golden girl. The amazing, strong and brave Gryffindor goddess that people wanted me to be.
Most of the time I felt I was losing control of myself. I hated that feeling of being a prisoner in your own body. Like I couldn't truly control anything.
Gods, I hated myself.
I hated myself for being so weak. I wasn't supposed to be weak.
I hated myself for letting my insecurities and my fears get to me in a way that hurt far more than anyone else could ever understand. That wasn't what Weasley's did. That wasn't how each of my amazing older brothers dealt with things. That wasn't how my parents dealt with things. That was not how I had learned to deal with things… but it was the only way that seemed to work.
And even though every time was the same, they were each different. Each time, though it left no physical scar, left a different emotional scar that I would carry with me for the rest of my life.
My scars of weakness. The thing is; I prided myself on being strong, even more so than people expected of me. If I didn't have strength, what did I have? Nothing. I didn't have money, I didn't have beauty, and I didn't have intelligence.
So, I was strong.
Only, I wasn't. I wasn't strong. I confused strength with emotional weakness. In order to be strong, I ignored my feelings, and stuffed them down into a little box where no one, not even me, would ever be able to find them. But they had to come out somehow.
And they did.
But people didn't see this. The only other person that knew of my weakness was dead. She was only the imprint of a soul on the land of the living, someone that seemed to matter even less than I felt I did. And she only knew because I used her bathroom. A place no one would find me. A place no one would think to look.
I would escape from my façade for just a few minutes a day while I was in here.
In here, I didn't have to be strong. I could be what I really was; weak.
For a few minutes a day, I could let my walls fall, I could come undone.
But only for a few minutes.
Then I would have to leave. And be who I was supposed to be, who everyone else wanted me to be, who I wanted to be. I would be young, happy and carefree. I would be strong. I would throw a smile on my face and let that hide who I really was. I would tie myself together with a smile.
Each and every time I left that bathroom I would do this. But slowly, very slowly I was coming undone, I could feel it. And I feared that eventually, my mask would slip for a fraction of a second too long and people would see what I really was, what I wasn't supposed to be.
Weak.