When all is lost, and the threads that hold us to earth are gone, vanished into the void, we are separated, diverged. Broken. Our hearts feel no pain, nor happiness, for all is quiet contemplation. There is no time for action, yet there is all the time in the universe.
She was Dora, and I was Lily.
She was the girl who was always changing, always stranger than the last time I laid eyes on her. I was the woman, living lonely, breathing only to see out my days as happy as I could be, though my raison d'être was a sour mystery. And we are the same. We were the same.
We both had one son, our pride and joy. We both had Muggle relatives, and had to suffer the ridicule of being a Mudblood (me) and a Half-blood (her). We were together the night her husband and her perished in the nettle of Hogwarts quite by accident; I was watching over the fallen as I noticed two figures sinking into my world without a whisper. Hand in hand, they crossed into the river of spirits as the living cried around them, but her husband went another way, and she came to me, her face staid, her hair turning a faint gray, changing color imperceptibly every other second, looking like dappled water in a stream.
We greeted each other silently, somehow knowing who the other was, and I knew she knew I was sorry. We never spoke that word, and we never will. Sorry means nothing when you have nothing to gain or to lose.
We spent the eternity silently sharing thoughts, thinking, feeling, knowing. One has much more perspective about life when it has left our souls. We came to know each other, and the bond only grew until I felt I could not leave her side. I knew she felt the same. We were in the kind of love that defies age, boundaries ─ old, long-forgotten beliefs ─ and life. I could not live without her; fortunately, I wasn't alive at all. I wasn't afraid of loss; after all, I had lost everything I loved, but she made me care again about the life I once had.
We were together in every way, and for the first time since I lost my life, I was happy.
But what are we now? Only figments of minds that will one day forget as well we ever lived. And on and on goes the pattern, until no one remains who could tell our story. Our lives never mattered, really, not to all of civilization that has taken thousands of years to develop into what we are today.
That's why I've left this book as my story. This book is a record of my life, and more importantly, my life with Dora, so that perhaps when our world is a mere graveyard of forgotten souls, left in space for new peoples to find and colonize before the day when our planet is swallowed by the sun, my story will be found. It will be deciphered and understood, read and reread, until maybe someone figures out who I was. Who we all were. Because in that book that I will leave my life in the context of the whole world, rather than just me.
But even if my story dies with this world, and is never read by a civilization, and learned by heart until my story and the story of the hundreds of others I touched along the way is known everywhere, at least I'll have the satisfaction and joy of writing it down in the first place. Reliving my life as the story of another is what makes me grateful for what I had, and what is yet to come in this great beyond.
I'm still with my beloved Dora, and our love is one for the ages.