*TW for allusions to and discussions of depression, eating disorders, abuse, rape, victim blaming, and suicide*
XXXXX
There are symptoms of prolonged exposure to Dementors that no one talks about.
It begins with headaches, muscle tension, and eye strain. There's nausea and dizziness and a sense of exhaustion that seeps so deeply into your bones that years of sleep couldn't remove it. You stop being able to sleep. You eat too much, then too little, then everything that you shouldn't and nothing that you should and it's still not enough. Your eyes sink into your head and your skin clings to your brittle form just waiting for the right moment to crumble. You're like a twig, so very easily broken, but there's a core of steel inside born of such intense apathy that while anything could destroy you nothing can touch you to get that chance. Everything is irrelevant. You are irrelevant, and you don't care. That's the way it should be.
Chocolate only works for the small things. It might take the edge off while you're still well enough to eat it, to swallow, to nurture your body when your entire being is screaming at you to lay and die with lack of dignity. It can't force you to eat anything else. It can't force you to want to eat anything else or to stop hating how your body looks when you eat anything else. It can't stop you from wanting to waste away into nothing. It can't stop the nightmares, the flashbacks, the endless internal screaming. It can't wash dishes or finish homework or repair broken friendships by sending that one damn owl that they need to show that you care when you can't. You just can't. Nothing is capable of changing that, and you don't know why.
You get used to it. No one tells you that, but you get used to it. Days blur into weeks blur into months and you forget that it was ever otherwise. You forget all of the lessons that your best friend gave you about fighting back with happiness and love because you have neither. You remember your birthday, being recognized as a top arithmancy master of your year, seeing your best muggle friend again after years of longing separation, and you know that you must have once felt happy. Even caught in the depths of despair, these small moments brought you happiness. It's transient and fleeting. What's gone is gone.
You learn to be satisfied with emptiness. It's almost comforting, the strange duality of feeling everything and nothing at all. After a while, it no longer bothers you when your body cries or shakes or hyperventilates and you don't know why. It no longer bothers you to laugh with friends as if you've never been happier in your life while somewhere in the back of your mind you feel only vague restlessness and curiosity about how long this pseudo-elation can last before it collapses in on itself. Your anger is like an explosive—easy to trigger, ravenous in its quest to destroy everything within its path, and as quick to run out of fuel and die as it came. You've learned to turn it inwards. You're used to dealing with the devastation that it leaves behind. If you resent those whom you spare, they'll never know it. They don't know anything about you, and it's better that way. They may have been your closest confidents before, but no one is a confident now, not even yourself. Sometimes, it's better not to know.
After a while, you forget that you should be scared. There's a hidden war beyond your doorstep, and you examine it like you would news of the O.W.L. exam undergoing a transformation for next year's students. Your classmates are suffering, your best friend is suffering, and you share their pain and take it upon yourself as best you can before they leave and the emotions flicker off so suddenly that you wonder if they ever truly existed. Your classmates are suffering, complaining of heartaches and lost love and girls who won't kiss them and boys who won't love them. You catch yourself wondering in passing what it would be like to get kissed, but you decide that it would be too inefficient. You wonder if the killing curse can be self taught and self performed. It's unforgivable, but so is your existence. You're sure that they'll understand eventually.
People try to comfort you, and you want to slap them. People pity you, and you could scream until your lungs burst and sullied all of their silky black robes. Other people have it worse! You want to shriek at them. Stop looking at me like I'm diseased, you want to beg of them. You silence your cries and learn to hide it. If you eat at lunch but not at dinner, sleep in the afternoon and read at night, raise your grades higher than they've ever been before and threaten to slash out your own eyes if they fall, people stop noticing. If you talk about McGonagall's essays and Snape's cruelty and I'm just tired and have you heard the news today? Those poor things and it's okay I just don't feel like going anywhere right now and I don't like going home for the holidays, everyone stops noticing. You stop noticing.
You don't need help, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get the fuck over it. So your childhood sanctuary has become a breeding ground for Dementors and fragments of their failed kisses are sliding around in your head like so many shattered hopes and dreams. So what? Lots of people have seen Dementors and survived. Everyone has their problems. You have yours, and they're irrelevant. You need to overcome them and prove yourself worthy of having had them. You need to stop being so selfish. Being around Dementors makes you selfish, did you know that? It traps you in your own head and forces you to relive your worst memories over and over until you're sick and trembling and willing to kill someone—anyone—you—to make it all end, and that's unforgiveable. Can't you see how many others around you are suffering in the same way? Can't you consider that there are worse forms of suffering than those created by Dementors? Can't you remember that your friend saw a boggart in the shape of a Dementor once, and really isn't that close enough?
The words assault your head like demonic prays. Selfish. Worthless. Fraud. Liar. Monster. Hateful. Failure. Idiot. Freak. Arrogant. Pathetic. Coward. Useless. Cruel. Unreliable. Weak. Evil. Deserving of this and so much worse. You don't know pain, but you deserve to. Everyone wishes that you would just so that you'd shut up and stop complaining about things that you could never really understand. Everyone is tired of your endless and unjustifiable self-pity. Everyone else is suffering from your moaning, groaning deceit. You are not hurting. This is not hurting. This is life. This is right. This is what you deserve.
Only bad people are attacked by Dementors, only miserable leeches who aren't willing to help themselves, parasites who are looking for an excuse to drain society of its limited time, energy, hope, love. You can feel it within yourself, your connection to the Dementor that gifted you with this indiscriminate hatred. You can feel it like a beast, a starving creature of the night, always the night. There is no goodness or light within you. Your hand twitches like you're straddling them, holding them down, draining their happiness, sucking their soul. Your misery sings a siren's song, and you want nothing more than to call up the same in others. You want to hurt them. You want them to hurt you. Your pain is too much, too much, everything is too much but never enough. Everything is muted around the edges, dulled and drained of colors. The result is not the softness of falling dusk but the harsh, jagged shadows of an eternal midnight when there's no moon to cast even a sliver of light. There is no light at the end of this tunnel. You'll make sure of it.
You look for them wherever you go, and you find them. There are Dementors on the street, in the office, in your niece's classroom, on playgrounds crouching behind the tallest slide. They leer at women and taunt men off the edges of cliffs and descend on small children like vultures spiraling down towards another's kill. The carnage soothes you. It's all in your head. Everything is in your head. You can find a Dementor at home, but he's not really there, and it's all in your head. No one knows what's wrong with you. There are no known symptoms for surviving a Dementor's attacks. The lists that circulate through the Quibbler, the worried whispers, the acknowledgment in the healer's sad eyes, all conjecture. It's all in your head. The Dementor is in your head. You are the Dementor? You should have known better than to speak of this. Your lies bring only pain and suffering to those who care about you enough to plead for you to see beyond your insane ramblings. You will never get better, and you know it, and they know it, and everyone knows it. The Dementors know it. They sense your terror hiding apathy hiding nothing. They're drawn towards you, and they welcome the collateral damage your once-loved-ones' pathetic attempts to protect you bring. Your very existence is a curse.
They understand now. Once the initial shock of finding your body hanging like a husk from the rafters wears off, they'll stop trying to make others understand the same. You were sick, they'll finally admit. Sick, and nothing more.
There are symptoms of being touched by Dementors that no one talks about.
XXXXX
Author's Note: I'm alive. I'm not actively suicidal and haven't been for at least two or three months. I'm not Rage, but we can't have everything, now can we?
Those of you who have read DID You Hear the Rabbit Cry are familiar with Rage's work. Rage has been absent for almost half of a year now, leaving me to carry on in her place. She was better at ignoring our depression than I am, but the worst of it has passed, and we survived it. I don't know when she'll return.
If you're curious, my name is Katherine. I'm the core or original personality. This is supposedly my life, but I'm not a very good host. I also write less in general, and I'm afraid to touch Rage's stories without her permission and for fear of screwing them up.
For those of you who are aware that we reported our grandfather for sexual abuse last summer, that report is going nowhere. Not only is it going nowhere, it panicked and angered other abusers, so I am being much, much more careful who I anger now.
Hopefully the next update will be happier and will actually be an update to an existing story. I apologize for the long gap in posting.