White
Love is a senseless emotion. It does not discriminate and it knows no borders. In love there is no real and no false, no appropriate and no inappropriate. It strives towards the impossible and one finds oneself in its tow; blind and deaf and dumb. It is hopeless to fight against its iron claws, which tear apart what they tie together.
At least, it was like that for me. I do not know if other people experience the same as me. There is worse in the world than to fall in love with the one person that will never love you back. There is worse than to be loved by someone you will never love in return; to watch their will to live slowly trickle away as they realise. I know because I know both and am both.
It is enough to drive anyone to insanity. It is why I sit here day after day in a room whose colour I will never tell from the whiteness that is my meager existence. A white bed in a white room and a white desk at which I write on a sheet of white paper, which I am only allowed because they know that it is the only fragile thread that keeps me here.
It was during the war, during the battle that it began. All I can remember is bright light streaking past me, green and orange and purple and red, hazy shouts and the smell of death and hate and, strangely, hope. I was one of them, shouting and running and shooting… spells… over my shoulder as I ran to help someone who had fallen close to me. I do not know their name anymore. After I woke up, I knew nothing but that for some strange reason, I was. A man with dark hair and a hooked nose was leaned over me, his eyes boring their way into my mind. I remember how he shuddered when his thought penetrated my mind. He met a wall of blankness that was not of my own construction, and he later confessed to me that it scared him more than anything before. To delve into nothing. No identity, no memories. I functioned as a human, and yet I had no sense of self, nothing to define me, nothing to hang onto.
They taught me a lot in the two weeks I spent in the infirmary at Hogwarts, as they called the place where I was kept. They called me Jane, which I knew was not my real name, but I had no attachment to my real name, and I did not want it. It seemed so foreign to me. I was told of my brilliance, of my reputation as one of the brightest minds in the world. But as much as they tried, they could not reawaken my past.
Until one day the man with the silvery hair, Albus was his name, told me he was sending me back so I could learn from myself who I was, or who I had been. He couldn't tell me much. I would go back to my sixth year. I would be an observer, a silent witness to my every action. The "time turner" had been modified so that I could be able to be called back after a year. They figured that it would be enough. It would be minutes for them.
A chain was placed around my neck and I spun into darkness. When I awoke from the darkness, I was lying in a corridor. A girl walked past me, through me. She shivered as she walked through the spot I was lying on. I was no more than a ghost, a presence who was not really there, hovering on the edge of the consciousnesses of those around me. Perhaps they sensed that I was there, but they could never see me.
I did not know who I was looking for. I did not know which student was – once – me. Inextricably I found myself drawn to the girl whom I had first encountered in the corridor. She was beautiful, all bushy brown hair and the smell of books and ink and parchment. I followed her tirelessly, absorbing her every move, learning her off by heart and slowly but definitely falling for her. At night I kept watch over her still body as the moonlight danced softly across her pale, soft cheeks. She never saw me, and yet I think, in a way, she knew that she was never alone.
Sometimes at night she would stand atop the Astronomy Tower and gaze into the starts before she could go to sleep. Sometimes I would come and stand at her side, my hand slipping into hers without her knowing, my lips on hers but never touching. I would whisper into her ear the words she wanted to hear, from anyone. I love you. Because I did, more than anything in the world. She was the most perfect being I had ever encountered and I wanted to be with her every second, to feel her sin on mine, to know that her joy and her sorrow were my joy and my sorrow.
I never wanted to leave her. I would rather have died.
And still I did know who she was.
But I was wrenched back into the future. Or was it the present? I don't know which anymore. I don't know where I sit on the great ball of threads that are time.
And I remembered. I remembered the nights when I slept and felt someone watching over me. The sense that someone was always watching me, wherever I went. The nights on the Astronomy Tower when I thought I felt soft lips on my own.
When I realised, my insides shattered into a million shards of glass, cutting away at what I thought was reality. I was caught inside a paradox, and had been ever since I began.
I couldn't stand knowing. The walls of my mind collapsed as the world around me did. The colours bleached into white, a whiteness that has surrounded me ever since. No-one ever knew why I flickered back into existence minutes after the chain was placed around my neck and could not stop screaming.
My mind still screams today. It cannot be blocked out and it will never leave me alone. My only chance at escape is to write, in the moments where I manage to scrape myself together.
Love makes you blind. I did not see what I did to myself. Even if I did, could I have changed what happened?
This is my story. And with its telling, with its ending, the fragile thread snaps, and I am free.