Shining.
That's how I'll always remember her. When the years of my life have solidified into nothing more than a fragile knot of memory, no matter how I peel the layers that will always be the way I remember her. I will always see her as I did then, as I do now. She will never grow old, dancing in the safety of my heart. Her face will never slacked with age; she will never look up at me, loose jowls quivering and sunken eyes still somehow aglow with some inner unquenchable light. She will always be beautiful in my mind's eye.
The events of that terrible day did nothing to tarnish her loveliness. If anything, it seemed only to enhance her, so that she glowed ethereally it seemed. She simply shone.
I will never forget the way that she looked when I found her. I will carry it like a scar across my heart, always. But it will not replace the true image of her.
She was gone when I found her. Her lovely face held a deathly pallor, like sick clay, and I knelt beside her, smoothing back the red-gold silk strands of her hair. Her sloe eyes gazed up, unseeing, towards a relentless black sky angrily slashed with brands of red and purple. She was unmarked, entirely. To look at her, you would have said she had quite simply died of happiness. The tiny smile about her lips paid testament to that. But to look closer would be to see the redness above her chest, the flecked blood on her lips.
The knife wound in the small of her back.
I watched serenely as they took her from me. They cleaned her up, made her presentable again.
Eventually.
I wouldn't let them touch her, make her filthy with their unworthy hands. I knew that they would diminish her shine, and I would allow no one near her. It was only when I felt the prick of a needle slid under my taut skin that I would succumb to them. I did not care.
She was gone from me, and it hurt. I can't even begin to describe what it feels like to have your soul ripped from your body. To feel your body moving, to eat, to sleep, to breathe, and yet to know that deep inside of you, there is nothing at all.
She comes to me as I sleep now. In my dreams she is smiling always, dancing barefoot in the grass she loved. Her hair pulses in the wind like a bird in flight, and her laughter floats on the breeze, as light and as beautiful as her heart. In my dreams, she is shining.
In my dreams, I am with Ginny.
