Disclaimer: Harry Potter is owned by J.K. Rowling.
**RTDU**
Entry 15: 24th September, 1999
Time is broken.
It has to be. Else why would it slip from me with every conclusion I reach. With every thought of recognition, of truth, of reality, moments vanish like so many motes of dust before the wind. Is it perception? Is it understanding? What makes it so?
I sit here again as night progresses ever onward, wondering how so much time has passed already. Even in this night, the span of time absorbed by my thoughts and musings has expanded far beyond anything I naturally would accept. Instead of swift conclusions I only draw long fought understandings. It hurts to feel my mind working at such a slow pace as this. And there beside me lays Ronald amidst the comfort of sleep I must deny myself. For every moment I sleep is a moment I am not furthering my decisions. How I wish I could begrudge him for that allowance.
As I sit and think, it feels as though time has frozen for me alone, to give me the emptiness my thoughts crave for stability. And upon awakening from a stupor of conscious configuration, I find that ti was instead a ruse. Time has no care for my thoughts. Time will never slow for me alone. Instead it allows me to believe a falsehood, that I have time. The truth is much more painful than that, for I have none. Days and weeks and months are nothing before the trepidation and suffering brought on by matters such as mine, unfinished as they are. Every goal I have formed, every need I have accepted, lies incomplete before me like every failing I have received or made for myself. i have accomplished nothing since my wedding night. Since I bent with nausea and then allowed my new husband to sate both our needs in a moment of needful forgetfulness. I won't deny that I have allowed it since and I won't deny that I have enjoyed it. For I crave forgetfulness, I crave silence, I crave peace.
None of these things can i yet give myself, for my peace is shattered by worry, my silence by thoughts and my forgetfulness by memories of which I have forced myself to reconsider. I am slowly tormenting myself and allowing the one thing that is holding this relationship together, to be my rock. It disgusts me what I have allowed myself to become and do. It frightens me to see such blatant frailty in my humanity. As if all the work I have done constructing a mind of logic and surety, building a persona that thrives on solving difficulties, has been for naught. I have wasted my time in those years of dreamy pretending. The years of my schooling made me cold and sure of my strength.
And now I have broken myself.
Those things that hold me to myself are the things I should in truth hold myself back from. The pleasures of the body, something i saw as rather unnecessary and frail for so long, now ground me in myself, my body, my humanity. The love I hold for the green eyed man who saved the world, well, that reminds me of who I am.
Little should be as I have made it so. I have sacrificed myself for my childish failings and expectations. And now I sit here crying like a fool without really understanding why. Thankfully Crookshanks is with me, curled in my lap where he belongs. He is the one man in my life right now that I am allowed to love, to receive comfort from and to protect. It has been just over six years now and for all his bluster and determination to be the only important creature on this earth, he gives me that grounding. Because he knows I care for him and only gives me his love in return. Cats are moody enough as it is, so when one actually lets you pet and cuddle it, well, only cat people understand how much that can mean in the moment. He doesn't judge me when I cry and he doesn't hate me for being confused. He just wants food and shelter. And of course the occasional praise when he catches a mouse.
I have build a world around myself that was so dependent on not needing people, so calm with only two truly close friends in it, that now I know not what to do with it. The feelings I hold for the two of them are confusing and rejected by my real wants and morality. I don't know what to do, and the worst part is that I created this problem entirely. I could have thought first, I could have been more introspective. I could have said no. I could have said "I love you" to the right person.
I could have told myself the truth.
Perhaps this confusion, this uncertainty, is the mourning process begun for the loss of my foolishness. The loss of my youth. Many things I have in this life are the result of necessity, or of necessary decisions made by a young girl who just wanted those she loved to survive a terrifying war. But in the end, what I have is the result of my actions, my choices.
If this is the mourning process for the death of my innocence, then I have a long way to go. I do not hate myself for what i have but I do not forgive myself as yet either. My choices left me with a mess of uncertainty and frightening choices. Choices that are no less urgent for the lack of a war. Choices I now have to make to either repair what my past has done to my future, or accept those pieces that want to break me. My childhood innocence has cost me much more than I would have ever thought possible.
Time it seems, is broken. Time it seems is heartless and cold, just like the war that made me who I am; a frightened adult who is in agony for what her youth has done to her.
Well, there is one good decision I made several years ago, and it is purring in warmth on my lap within a bundle of orange fur and contented smugness. Ever so glad to have found you Crookshanks my friend.
For now,
Friendship, bravery, and love.