Author's Note: This was written for the A Letter From My Hogwarts Days Challenge - 2012 edition. My character was Phineas Nigellus Black and I must admit I struggled a bit.
June 1st 1865
And so another year at Hogwarts School of Witch Craft and Wizardry is almost at an end. But, unlike past years, the doors close on me for the last time. I will not leave to go on my holidays with the reassurance that I will return to these hallowed halls again. I leave to go into the world, the real world, a place I have never been. The people who have been there do not rave about it. It is all bills and work and watching those around you sink into unspeakable poverty; to be perfectly honest I do not think it will suit me.
I have never wanted to take life seriously, a fact I'm sure most of my professors will confirm. A day in which I can laugh with friends is all I really ask. But I fear the world will change me to a point when I cannot laugh at myself anymore. The day when I can no longer laugh at all will follow, trailed by the sad time when I do not recognize the person I have become.
If you are reading this, then you are me, a future version of the boy who writes this. Perhaps I have not changed as much as I predicted. What ever your present and my fate holds, I write this to you as a plea. I write this to remind you of what once you valued. I ask you, as your origin, to do these few things for me:
Remember how to smile. If the world is as hard as they say, then things will inevitably get tough. It is possible that you have weathered many storms, storms that I would not be tactless enough to downplay in this note. I can not say what the future holds, but if you have indeed reached the point when laugher no longer comes, I ask that you remember. I am the joker, you were the joker; we can be that again.
Never close your mind. We were raised in an environment that drilled a singular mindset. We have been told all lives the right things to do and think. While I would never think of asking you to disobey the words of our excellent parents, I only wish that you should be open to the possibility that they were wrong. Find your own way of thinking, do not be kept in stone by the beliefs of our ancestors.
Do not look back too often. As I realize now, looking at around at the common room that has been my home for seven years, there are parts of my life, which were parts of your life, that will come to an end. We can not go back, even if we should want to. I pray that you never get lost, looking at what you had. Take only memories and lessons, leave only footprints and then lock the door.
Do not become like our father. I do not speak of the man who ran governments single handedly, taught us how to fly or gave us a roof over our heads. I talk of the man who drank more than he should, hit our mother and, though he was surrounded by people, ultimately died alone. He tried to take too much upon himself. Remember you are only human and do not make the mistakes that he did.
Part of me doesn't want to finish writing this; perhaps, as you read it, you will remember the feeling. As soon I finish this, I must go and take my final examinations. I do not want to, but that is the way of the world. I daresay that I have had to do many things I did not want to do in my journey to becoming you. I wonder, if there was a way to see my fate, would I look? At present, I think it is best not to know. Maybe you feel differently. Whatever happens, I hope I shall not disappoint you. I hope you do not look back on this with regret. I hope that you have lived, as I have so far, and not merely existed.
Yours Hopefully,
Phineas Nigellus Black
Headmaster Black saw the faded parchment envelope at the bottom of a trunk one day. He ripped it to pieces, for he knew it contained promises he had not kept to a boy he no longer knew.