A/N: Chapter Thirty! This one's a little bit different than the others. I promise the next one will be normal lol.
I know, I know.
I started this memoir lighthearted and humourous, and I have now subjected you to nothing short of a Nicholas Sparks novel; complete with several ounces of doomed love, emotional sex and inner turmoil — topped with some classic Jeff Buckley for soundtrack. But here's the thing: I would have taken months, years, decades of the heart wrenching, ill-fated love than what I had before, which was emptiness. Being with Nott saved me, as much as it saved him. I know it's cliche and tired, but when you do come across that one person — be it a friend, colleague, family member or stranger — the world begins to make sense again. It's like, life becomes more than enduring and existing. It has meaning. All those small, insignificant things, become beautiful and important — so, so important.
There were days when I would wake up and breathe, and even that had meaning to it.
But before we move on to the thick of this roller coaster memoir, there's something I've been meaning to share with you, something I've had for a long, long time. It's an excerpt from my roommate's journal, the one he kept before we reconnected at the Harvest Moon Party. He gave it to me a couple days after we returned from the ski trip, and I've had it ever since, tucked into my own journal, where I fall in love with the words and the person behind them — time and time again.
21st June, 2001
I'm not sure where to start.
It's a curious concept — putting quill to parchment, hoping the words on the page have some reflection of the thoughts, dreams and ultimate fears that inspired them, wondering somewhere deep down, if anyone out there will care enough to know the truth about you. It's very dramatic, isn't it? Perhaps that's the takeaway from all of this. We write, not to inform, but to remember. Then comes the question: What do I want to remember, above all else?
Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
Maybe just one thing, or one person, or one night; one night that replays over and over and over again, like a broken record, like mum's scratched copy of Unchained Melody — the one that sits in the record player, where she left it twenty-one years ago. I think about her often, about what she would be like, had I known her a day.
More than anything, would she have cared for me, the way I'd always imagined? I think that's the worst part in having lost her, the fact that I have no memories to fall back on or photographs to skim. I have nothing but a name, Eleanor Black, and the constant reminder that she looked at me once, twenty-one years ago, with Healers and nurses hovering over her, as she held her son during his first few moments in this world, all the while slipping away, second-by-second.
I think about her often, my mother.
But most of all, I think about the man she left behind — my father. I think about the man he used to be, and how he transitioned into a bitter, resentful wizard. It scares me that we're related, that one day, I could end up like him; alone and without one friend to stand at my bedside, as disease takes me.
Because that's the root of this.
I'm dying.
Not in a proverbial, new-age-y sense. I'm actually dying. I've known since I was a teenager, since my fifteenth birthday, and even though it's been six years since then, I still can't come to terms with the fact that it's all going to disappear one day. I'll wake up and I'll be a shadow — at best, a fleeting thought in the back of someone's mind.
I suppose that's why people journal.
To be immortal.
To give meaning to the small things and the big things and the things that make no sense at all.
But what about those complicated, open-ended things? What about them? Do those questions get answers? Do those memories start to fade? Does that voice, or those eyes, or that laugh that's been stuck in my head all this time? Do those things fade? What about her name? If I wrote it down, would she know this is about her? Would she remember?
Because I do.
I remember.
Here's to being immortal.
Signed,
Theodore Nott.
A/N: Thoughts?
Cheers
xo.