His Old Photographs
"Theo, don't let your galleons jingle like that, you're going to get yourself killed."
He is used to my scolding. Too used to it not to be bothered by it. I see the look pass his face again, dismissive. He swings his leather pouch around in the air to tease me, but the smile doesn't rest long on his face after I've taken his hand in mine and forced the pouch back into his robes.
Every time I touch him I'm afraid he'll hit me. I'm afraid he should hit me. It doesn't matter if I'm doing the right thing, every time I touch him it's selfish of me. It's like I drain joy from his skin in the form of small fireworks. He must have realized it by now, he must know.
"Blaise, you always say I'm going to get myself killed. Yet somehow, I'm here alive and well."
"Perhaps if I didn't say it, you wouldn't be."
He rolls his eyes at me. We keep walking. We can't hold hands here so I clench my fist in my pocket. Can't hold hands.
"Blaise," he said after a few more paces, "Do you believe in an afterlife?"
"No."
"I do. Why don't you?"
I don't believe in the afterlife because I'm not an idiot. I'm not so stupid as to alleviate the realness of every action taken on earth by imagining some sort of justice machine in the sky. Just because bad people deserve to be punished doesn't mean they will. They die and they get off the hook. Or else they are punished because their life, their relationships, their success is shallow. Either way there is no Hell, no re-birth as a lowly fungus, no tribunal of the undead counting up your wrongdoings. There is life, and death is the end of it.
People who believe in an afterlife are people who don't have enough power so they invent something big and soothing and on their side. They can't see a relative again—so they imagine that they will. They can't prevent a disaster or increase their luck, so they imagine they can if they just wish for it enough. Their religion is their father or their genie and either way it is a selfish vehicle of delusion for those not courageous enough to accept that life, human life, is all-encompassing, and that death is simply the bookend to the universe, not another chapter.
If people put as much energy into helping other people who are actually alive as they did building monuments and reciting prayers for the dead, then maybe suffering could take a dip for once. But people are selfish and stupid and hopeful and social instead of pragmatic and calculating and lonely. Idiots, the lot of them.
"I don't because I guess I just haven't given it any thought before."
Theodore laughed and I felt it in my chest.
"You're a dreadful liar. As many funerals you've attended and you haven't given it thought? You're full of shit."
"Yeah, maybe I am."
I smile and follow him into Flourish and Blotts and watch as he looks through the newest Arithmancy books and I think of the woman with dark hair and warm eyes and cold hands in all his old photographs.