The feeling almost overwhelms me
I let a few of my
defenses fall
and I smile a bitter smile
not a pretty thing to see
Written at two in the morning on January 10th, 1986—never mailed
Sirius,
I'm not sure if you have any sense of time there. I'm not even sure that you'd remember today if you did. I was always the girl in the relationship anyway. That's what you'd tell me. Do you remember?
I don't know what exactly I expected eight years ago today when you pulled me into Hogsmeade at one in the morning on a Tuesday night and pulled me close by my scarf and kissed me like nothing has ever mattered before. It obviously wasn't this, but I don't know how I could've expected things to end well. I think I'd always thought we'd both die the death of heroes, and always together. I think I'd imagined us fighting his followers back to back one day when we'd both be hit by killing curses simultaneously, and we'd fall laughing, together. Or at least maybe that's what I'd wished happened.
I certainly never imagined you'd end up in Azkaban, not for... what you did, and that I'd end up huddled up in a creaky old bed with old pictures in a muggle house with a drippy ceiling and no hot water. Not that I'd still miss you after something like that, not that I'd be this... alone. Not that I'd find out that you weren't who I thought you were at all and I'd still love this idea of you, this person that was never real and never will be.
I guess I was just wondering when you stopped remembering, because I haven't. Remembering James' laugh and the way Lily's tired green eyes never stopped shining and the way James used to let Harry play with his snitch and that old grumpy cat they used to have and the way you used to be able to put him to sleep when no one else could and the way his first word was "Pads" and the way you smiled at me when you heard him say it, because I haven't. And I don't get it, and I don't think I ever will, and I don't think that it'll stop haunting me until I understand, but I don't think I'm going to find an explanation to any of my lists and lists of questions. I wonder if the dementors drive you as crazy as the memory of all of this drives me.
When James and Lily died, I remember not going to the funeral. I remember not leaving the apartment for two months. I remember wishing for death. It's not easy to have nothing left, and I mean nothing: no friends and no humanity. But I remember that December around Christmas time when I finally scraped myself off of the floor and dragged myself down to the cemetery in Godric's Hollow, it felt so damn liberating. I sat in the snow and cried and I wasn't sad, I was angry, but then it was over and I went home and instead of four weights smothering me, there was only one. The thing is that when someone dies, it's like a slicing wound that cuts to the bone, but it closes and heals; it always does. It leaves a scar, but I have plenty of those. You're not gone, and every time I remember this it's like the wound opens back up again, and there's never going to be any closure. I can't say goodbye to you. I can't even say goodbye to a damn rock with your name on it, and I'm not even sure that there's a you to say goodbye to.
Despite my best efforts, I still fucking love you.
Moony