[ the body project ]
"... you have your mother's eyes..." --Albus Dumbledore
[possiblemaybe dreaming]
He lies on his bed and watches through half-closed lids the snake twine across the bed's canopy; around the bedposts. Not frightening or threatening, simply there, as if it was always meant to be there, a comforting fixture in an uncertain, ever-changing world.
The grit of the previous evening ingrains itself on his eyes, twisting across his line of vision without a semblance of grace. Then one of them wriggles over to the snake, serenely curled around the left bedpost; intertwining to become the bright, fleshed-out snake and its photographic-negative counterpart.
Finally they slither over to him, wrap their slick tails around his ears and rest their heads on his forehead, and he can feel them slowly dissolving into his skin, becoming something more than just snakes, lying and slowly melting into his skin, twined together in a jagged, sharp zigzag.
[awakening]
Somehow what should be the gentle drifting back to self-awareness turns into a sharp jolt back to reality -- it reminds him of something he had dreamed the night before; the memory of it chased away by his eagerness to catch and analyse it.
He wakes up with uncomfortable dryness in his mouth; his hand automatically brushes his scar -- a habit cultivated over the years. The scar carves deep into the bone, like the grooves in a statue, only in flesh.
[learning the useless]
When the ground falls away from his feet and he can no longer feel his head resting heavily on his arms, he knows he is asleep. Images seep into his eyes from darkened corners -- vividness is a rare occurrence-- and they click and fall into place with mechanical prettiness, languidly strolling out from torn and charred black-and-white photographs.
His mother is shaking him and telling him urgently, but everything seems so far away now... "Harry. Harry. You have my eyes. Please, please give them back. You have my eyes, Harry. Give them. Back1"
The final word ends in a shriek that makes his body in the real world shudder once. His mother is now pointing at her own eyes, but he can see nothing wrong with them...
Oh.
She has no eyes. Her voice is screaming at him, but he can only hear the menace and danger in the situation itself. Somewhere, the part of him he considered to be him watches from a corner of his mind as he frantically scratched at her empty sockets. It covers its mouth in horror and shame as his nails drew blood from the pale skin, staining the already red hair with a horribly bright redness...
And now he can see colour, and the red pulls at his eyes, and for a moment he can feel the tendrils of the hair and the blood swiftly pulsate and travel along his veins, as if a million snakes have invaded his body.
And then the tentacles draw back, and he falls to his feet. His mother kneels with him and grabs him by the shoulders -- he winces and tries to escape, but she holds firm. Twin green snakes emerge from her empty sockets and flick their tongues at him lazily, their heads venturing out into the dream-air.
"Harry... you have to wake up now... open my eyes, Harry, open my eyes!"
He feels the ground pound back into the soles of his feet as Professor McGonagall stands in front of him, eyes narrowed and mouth pinched. He senses Hermione cringing beside him, so ashamed for him, for his sleepy eyes.
[charred memories]
He is looking through some photograph albums Professor Lupin mailed him a while ago, in brighter, more vivid colours ("...retouched them with new spell technology..." the letter read). He squints at a photograph of his father and mother lounging at the side of the photo, eyes wide and sincere with newfound love. Then his mother moves, batting aside his father's lazy hand, and points to her iris with an earnest look on her face. It was a bright green, too much like his.
Harry closes his eyes and traces his hand over his scar for reassurance, then over his eyelids, touching them with his forefinger once, twice, three times. Reassuring himself that with his touch, his eyes will be his, that the unnaturally vivid green are his only and are not shared with his dead mother.
The eyes reminds him too much of something that lurks at the back of his head, of the lush rainforest-green of another creature, in another place where he does not want to be; of another creature that he does not want to become.
Sometimes, he feels as if his eyes have seen too much, as if having lived another life before his own.