"So this is how it's going to be now," Ginny thought to herself as she stared up at the ceiling of her four-poster bed, curtains drawn around her so that she was still in her own small world. "I will wake up every morning into a world without him."
She rolled over onto her side and tried to imagine the rest of her life, years in which she would be expected to get over it, move on, find happiness on her own. It didn't seem like the sort of life worth living.
In the days following the final battle, it had been acceptable to be in a state of shock, to have unprompted fits of grief, to feel as though the world had ended – even though, with the death of Voldemort, the wizarding world at least was beginning to return to normalcy. She could share the experience of devastating loss with her friends and family, or what was left of them. But now, in her seventh year at Hogwarts, Ginny felt the weight of expectation pressing down upon her shoulders. She must carry on and finish her studies. She must remember Harry as others did, a martyr who gave his life to protect everyone else, and not as the boy whom she had previously imagined spending the rest of her life with.
She sat up and slowly pulled back the curtains, looking through the window near her bed at the grounds of Hogwarts. It had taken many powerful wizards much time to carefully reconstruct the damaged parts of the school, and even now the building still had the feel of an injured being. Something, at its core, had been wounded. Ginny identified with her school, feeling that it, too, was being asked of a task too great to complete: to put the past behind it and bravely face the days to come. "Our whole bodies carry broken spirits," she whispered to no one in particular, still gazing out the window towards the Forbidden Forest. She watched as a thestral flew down into the trees. "We all can see them now," Ginny thought, and slowly began to get dressed.