We once spent a summer with the Dursleys, Harry, Ron and I. The last summer we ever had together. The first summer for Ron and I. Last summer for us, too, I suppose. It was a hellish two weeks, the world was falling apart around us and we were growing up too fast for anyone's liking, and we had to do chores.
Sometimes, it felt like the only normal thing left. That summer, Dudley was at a correctional institute- or at least that's what Harry said after it was announced he'd be at a camp all summer. Ron and I shared his room; Mr. and Mrs. Dursley didn't care so long as their lawn got mowed.
That bed, right there, with the child's covering of blue sailboats, too many, too flat pillows, that's where I lost my virginity. I went into this room, assuming I could lock Snape in it and leave. I couldn't. I collapsed onto the bed, crying, wanting the past to come back. Wanting Ron.
Wanting Draco more than anything else.
It used to be that I'd have fits, Harry called them storms and I was given light sedative potions, and if he could, he'd sit with me. He was always nervous about it, though. Then Draco came and said I couldn't live out the rest of my life in a stupor. At first, he'd just sit with me, and then one day, it didn't happen. For the first time in nearly a year, I could leave my room without the memories assaulting me, without the collapse. The next day, I woke in the night screaming. And he held me, wrapped me in his arms and whispered anything he could think of to try to calm me down.
Perhaps that's when he fell in love with me. I don't know and I don't care.
This wasn't a feeling I was familiar with until Ron's death. And I can say that now. His murder. His passing. All the stupid euphemisms for death and gone and killed and left you that I've ever heard, I can say all of those now. But it's when it jumps up on me- when I know but I don't know- that I feel this way. When Harry makes pasta- Ron's favorite, the plainer the better- and doesn't tell me. When I come downstairs to see he and Draco playing chess- launching the pieces at each other, cheating outrageously half the time.
And it's all so familiar to me now, the stages of it.
I'm broken, first, I can't think, or feel, or do anything but collapse on the spot. And that sounds like the worst part, but it's not.
Then I'm caught up in it, and it's like being in a net. And not so much alone, I feel crowded out of my own mind by my own demons. That's the worst part. I see his face then. I haven't forgotten a single feature, a single motion. When I see him, he's sleeping.
And there's a blank after that. I don't know if that's healing- it's like a sadness hangover. I'm still awake; I can function. Sometimes it's only been three minutes since I was perfectly fine. But I'm not quite fine, it used to be that I could hear laughter in the background- a ringing sound in my ears, and I thought people were laughing at me.
It's funny now, to think that I was insane for so long. My healing- and I like to call it that, recuperation sounds so clinical- took six months. And I want to believe that I'm healed, too. I think I am healed.
I like to thank God for that.