This is a short angsty ficlet I wrote on a really hot day in July. It's my first fic, and I started off writing about Harry and Ginny, but it ended up like this. Funny how those things work!

This is Ginny's perspective, by the way. But you knew that.or did you? Please review!!!

Some people are unforgettable. They leave a mark on our lives that isn't a scar on a brow or a skull on a forearm.

No.

They touch us deep within, in a place nobody knows about except those who have been marked, those who know what it is like.

Before Tom, I was pure, like an artist's canvas, waiting to be painted into a masterpiece. But Tom's muse missed. Instead of an image of divine beauty and perfection engraved on my soul, great ugly splotches of scarlet and black soiled my once pristine innocence, corrupting my very being. With each life he froze through me, my childhood was stolen, bit-by-bit; until I stood stripped bare of any happiness and good that might have dwelled deep in the darkest corners of my heart.

Mirthless, friendless, and frightened, Tom betrayed me. He had taken all he could from me and fled, leaving me with a grotesque abstract painting for a keepsake.

For a heart.

Or course, Time heals all wounds. Harry made sure Tom couldn't do to another what he had done to me, and our physical pains were soothed. But Tom's mark on my heart remained, soiled, desecrated with filth.

Luckily, even the most daunting clean-ups can be done. As I became more and more confident in my self for whom I was, not for someone living through me, layer after layer of hate, greed, and evil were lifted from my once snowy soul.

I was cleansed.

The trouble with a pure heart, however, is once it has been stained, it will never return to its original brilliance. Yes, as time went by some of my gaiety and light-heartedness returned to my life. But deep in the most secret realm of my soul there remains a faded dash of ebony and the faintest speck of crimson, remnants of Tom; the love he took from me, and the pain he gave me in return. They are the sole reminders of my first true love, and because of them, I will never forget.

I am marked.