A/N: This is more of a sample of the start of this passage. It's kind of cut-off abruptly. I'll re-upload it when I finish.
As the days go by, more and more frequently I think back on the past – taking all my pleasures, deriving all my contentment from a time that once was. I am old now, so very, very old. Each progressive hour is a feat with which my body struggles. However, I am not overly anxious; I don't fret at night as many of the other men and women here do – crying out in their sleep and waking up in the middle of the night, screaming, plagued by ghosts and demons trying to speed them to their deaths. Even now, the most malicious of demons couldn't scare me. I've seen it all, and I'm certainly not afraid to die. Not now. My time will come when it comes, and I'm ready. But though their yells don't frighten me or even bother me that much, they remind me of my past. They remind me of the times Voldemort beset my mind with visions. Or even of his own last, fatal howl.
Here, death saturates every colorless wall. Its odor permeates every vent; its sound, every voice; its inexorable tangles, every other thought. Bertha sometimes confides in me of the soft footfalls she hears, tracing her every step. And, sometimes, she says, she can feel Thanatos breathing down her neck, biding time until he can take her soul. Bertha is probably the only person I converse with, now. We are both a decade older than the rest of the inmates, and, though we never knew each other until the nursing home, there's no one else who could possibly understand even a fraction of my past. They say that as you get older, age matters less. I think it's more like height. After you reach a certain age, it progresses backwards; as you shrink, so do your peers matter more and more. A few years may not mean much, but a decade seems like an eternity. The other, younger inmates lived in a time so very different from our own, experiencing different misfortunes, their greatest worries were of learning to adjust to a new world.
Even though Bertha wasn't a target of the war, she understands much of it. She comprehends, at least to a minimal degree, the grave suffering I endured and the extraordinary miracle of which was every second of my life. While so early in my life, my school years were so overwhelming, exceedingly painful, and yet so special.
As I glance across the room, I watch a wrinkled and shaking hand reach across a table and move a chess piece, and I am transported to another time, a distant face. A loopy grin of fairer days – fonder, lighter cares. That bright red hair that told of passion, an unrelenting fiery soul, speaks to me verbose and bawdy. Oh, these memories. In utter clarity, I recall.
Ber … I suddenly can't recall her name. Oh well, she probably doesn't expect me to remember. I believe all of us here have learned to accept such short-comings. It happens to us all once and again. It's funny, really, how such simple things often slip my memory now. And yet, I can remember in a piercingly perfect clarity my earliest school years. I used to wonder if this was because my youth was so extraordinarily eventful. However, in the past few years I have conversed with many of the other elderly and they concurred with my observations in regards to their own memories. The most distant memories are by far the clearest.