House: Ravenclaw
Position: Transfiguration
Category: Drabble
Prompt: [Emotion] Loneliness
Word Count: 658
A/N: AU. I wanted to explore the idea that loneliness need not be only based in isolation, but that it can be a complex result of need to isolate or retreat from society in order to make sense of a world that is difficult to perceive for the subject in question.
Reference: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — Sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
All allusions to the Greek myth of Pandora and her infamous box intentional.
Sonder under the Milky Way
The wind was fast and chilling, swirling in that wild way it had as the seasons changed and the earth edged towards chaos. It whipped and whirled as if it might just as easily whisk one off to another dimension as it would throw one off the Astronomy Tower to an untimely demise. Anarchy. It was a sensation that only the in-between seasons could conjure up; autumn or spring. Seasons that danced on the edge of a sword that Damocles never imagined. No deep winter cloud cover or stifling summer heat could bring on the same feeling of disarray. No; this was the realm of the equinoxes.
Invoking more than just the occasional gale, it boiled the blood of magical and mundane alike. It made haste its friend, disorder its compatriot. It was the beautiful, tumultuous, ancient magic of the Earth that defied command by witch or wizard. It was what leapt out of Pandora's box; and it made no promises for what would be left in its wake.
Luna sighed aloud, only to hear her own voice echo off the stone walls, a song of her own solitude. Comfort could be a warm embrace, the voice of a fellow child of Adam to soothe one's fears if only she knew how to ask for it. No, tonight would be like so many others where only the cold fire of a full moon as it cascaded across slate and skin would answer with silence.
It would do, as it had before and likely would again. There was no diminishing the heartache when it took hold; only the resolve to ride it out.
Luna knew all about acceptance. It was the miracle of her being; present, unperturbed, charitable. Yet, it was deeper than that. Her acceptance was as much a forced compulsion as it was a natural state of being. Luna had no say in her mother's death while she was young; it was thrust upon her. She had no say in the disarray that was left behind; that she was left behind. She had only her solitude and the Thestrals and an empty place in her life where her mother had been.
And bitterness. Don't forget the bitterness it left behind. You keep it locked up tight behind your Nargles and your Beetle Wing Earrings and your silver dress robes. Who could ever see you for who you really are through all of that.
Her legs kicked off the stone wall of the high tower, a shoe flinging itself, not for the first time, out into the courtyard below. Luna stared into the face of the moon with longing and sorrow. Her eyes shone like blue stars, glittering with constellations of heartache dancing over her pale lashes. The world was so large, the people so complex. She barely understood herself, her place in it. How would she ever begin to fathom the depth of another's experience? How would she ever scratch the surface of how another felt?
Could she ever know the comfort of forgiveness? The freedom of hope?
It was only here, as she looked up into the night sky that she might feel the tight fist of anxiety release. Moon and planets and galaxies… the smallness of her own world, much less her individualism within, was reassuring. When her mind spun out of control with worry or dove down into the depths of despair, it was here among the wind and the wild and the twinkling of stars that she remembered how little it all mattered. The chaos of the universe pressed forward; and the small things fell away like losing a shoe. Loneliness was but a fleeting flicker of a comet's tail; an inch of a turn around the sun. It is, and was, and will be again as surely as the sun would rise in a few hours' time.
And in this way, she felt the comfort of ages, knowing this, too, shall pass.