She was just a little wisp, like a small white feather floating in the wind. A little ruffled at the edges, but not stuck to any real time or place. She had no direction except up and away, up and away from everyone. Her problems could only chase her and only the rain could bring her down, but she would rise again, lifted into the air by an ambitious force.
It was really the wind that carried her and most of the time she was grateful for its direction, but sometimes she wished she could carry herself. Sometimes she wished she were a solid, real, and touchable person and not just some beautiful unattainable wisp.
She had flowing red hair and emerald green eyes that often sparkled for no one but her.
She liked to stand outside in October because the air smelled like summer and winter at the same time and her cheeks always flushed, whether from the burn of the wind caressing her warm flesh, or a contentment she only found when she was alone.
She had learned to be alone, something that no one should really have to know because loneliness is a terrible thing.
Oftentimes she was lonely, but she didn't fear it like other people I knew. She learned how to be alone and taught herself to be happy just how she was, for she knew she'd never truly belong with the rest.
She was passionate, this much I knew.
She loved challenges, but no one ever seemed to challenge her enough, which left her disappointed in people. "People are disappointing," she told me once, "because they always have a tendency to let others down at some point or another." And I had never known her to be this cynical. I'm sure when the only person you have to rely on is yourself, you begin to lose faith in others just a bit
I don't think anyone ever saw her vulnerable, for even at worst she was still such the best that no one could really understand. Only I saw her real vulnerability, only I saw how much faith she had really lost having to make her own way up, tossed about by the changing winds.
I think I'm the only person that she ever really let in, but I don't know if I managed to get that far. "James, I wish you could see the way I could sometimes, its such a bore having to look at the world and try to convince others to see it too" she once told me in a plain and wistful tone. That was before I realized how taken with her I really was.
I often thought about how she saw the world and came to the conclusion that she was never really part of one time but everywhere at once. She saw beauty and she felt pain, but she suffered silently.
"Lily darling," I told her the next day (I called her darling not in any romantic sort of way at the time) "you are living between three worlds." She nodded only, to show she knew exactly what I meant. She was sharp like that, quite bright and she understood people even though no one seemed to understand her. She really was living between three worlds, one was the muggle world, which held a childhood she could never go back to, but built a foundation she could never really forget. The next was a magical world, one with Hogwarts, I was in this world and I hoped some day she would be understood by it. The last world was just another dimension; she was just so above everyone else, so much more worthy that she never really seemed to fit. That was when I realized that I had an infatuation with an untouchable creature and I was quite doomed.
Trying to catch a feather is quite a difficult task, trying to snatch it from the air because it always slips through your fingers. From that time on, I felt like I was trying to snatch a white feather from amidst a blizzard, nearly impossible, but plausible all the same. I often found myself grasping at nothing, but every once in a while I'd have a break though. She hurt me without realizing it, but helped me to survive all the same.
I am persistent which is quite good in this case, I suppose. I never gave up.
I fought with her a lot, only because she loved to be challenged and I loved to challenge her. There were days when she hated me, but it only made me like her more, only made me want to see her red in the face and yelling because it brought her closer to me, made her more human and understandable.
My friends thought I was nuts, trying to catch her. I had told them how she was a feather, a beautiful wisp, and they would question why I would ever want her out of all the girls I could have. "She's different" I'd say, "she's Lily," besides feathers need to stick together to really fly.
Lily once told me that she liked animals because they accepted without thought, they were just so perfectly simple that they didn't understand ideas like prejudice and differences. She was the victim of a lot of prejudice, and I knew it bothered her that people were so unjust towards each other, but she never did pay much attention to the whispers that followed her captivating form.
She cried once, in front of me that is, and I would come to see her cry many more times before I loved her. No one at Hogwarts had ever seen her cry, besides me of course, but as I had come to learn she cried often. She could be found crying on the roof of Hogwarts, a broom clutched in her hand and a letter from home sat next to her on top of a small box full of letters. No one understood her; no one accepted what they couldn't understand. No one at school would ever make her cry, that much she told me. People who she didn't love weren't worth her tears.
She loved so much, yet she loved so little. She held a disdain for humans but they still fascinated her. "I like to study them," she said to me while we were looking out a window towards the people on the edge of the lake on the Hogwarts grounds. "They show me that sometimes people are good and sometimes things go right."
"The best kind of people" she told me a month later, "Are the kind of people who do good things when no one is watching. I am invisible and outside and that's how I see life."
She entranced me. I don't know how much she really believed in romance, but she was secretly a romantic. She would become a matchmaker for people who never realized it, but she would make lives better and go out of her way just to help one person who would never know she had a hand in their fate.
Everyone had some vague impression of who she was, but no one really interacted with her. She stood up for everyone, which is when I liked her best. She didn't care if they had wronged her in the past, she didn't believe in vindication or punishment. She believed that everyone had a bit of good in them which is why she was still in love with humanity, despite all of her distance from them.
"Compassion is a virtue." I told her when I found her crying because she could not save any world she lived in. She really wanted to save her worlds because they were slowly falling into ruin around her.
I started to like October. I started to throw leaves into the air and follow them around in dizzying circles until they touched the ground to be swept up by the wind.
I sometimes would leave her letters under her pillow, which I managed to magic up there. I told her everyday that she was special, even though it would start an argument between us. She thought everything was special and she was just ordinary. I thought she was extraordinary.
Soon her wispy self wasn't so far out of reach, just a touch out of my grasp. I was stunned by our closeness. I loved every bit of it.
No one ever bothered to learn about Lily. Lily was a lonely girl with sadness in her eyes, forever traveling, and forever being swept away from the rest of humanity. I loved her. Someday she would kiss me, someday she wouldn't be so afraid to be disappointed. Someday she would put herself out o the line for me and I would never disappoint her like everyone else had.
I caught that wisp of a ruffled feather by restoring its faith. Beauty is only found when you love something enough to catch it and hold it dear. "You're untamable," I'd tell her, and I'd never truly understand her way of seeing the world, but I thought she was beautiful and passionate and we could be together and be so different and so dependent.