Take a look at your arm.
If you're like most normal people, I would assume that you've never really looked at your arm before. I mean, you've probably looked at it at some point in time, but very rarely do people look at their arms with a purpose. It's almost astonishing the way people can obsess over their bodies, the way people can spend hours in front of the mirror, agonizing about their supposed flaws – flaws that, if I may say so myself, no other rational person would ever probably notice because they're far too busy thinking about their own flaws.
It creates a vicious cycle, laboring under the belief that no one else is as self-involved as you are when that's hardly ever true. For example, if someone points out one of your flaws – say you're a bit fat, and someone calls you out on it – it almost always hearkens back to the insulter, them, being insecure, and it has very, very little to do with the insulted, you. But you will take it personally; they would take it personally; most people would take it personally, and that's why most people spend 75% of their lives wasting away in front of a looking glass.
So, with that in mind, take a look at your arm.
Arms are not regularly judged by society, not the way faces and legs and bums are, so I'm asking you to look at your arm as if you've never seen it before, to examine it as if was as important of a factor in you finding a mate as your nose shape. (Your nose is lovely, by the way.)
Look at the skin, and pinch it together. Watch the way it creases to form mountains, the way your hairs stand on end like trees, and the way your tiny, tiny pores have turned into tiny, tiny mountain-holes.
Now imagine that you could change one pore, that you could cave in one mountain-hole, with just a simple thought. Imagine that you could change the color of just one hair in a fraction of a second.
It's kind of underwhelming, isn't it? You're looking at your tree hairs in whatever natural tree hair color spouts from your body and you're imagining that one of them, for some odd reason, is purple. What on earth does a purple little hair matter?
I don't expect you to understand. But Nymphadora Tonks spent many hours in her bedroom, staring at her arms, watching her mountain-holes vanish and reappear, watching individual hairs slurp back into her dermis and go... Well, she didn't know where they went. But she could feel her muscles contract and change, and, as far as she knew, she couldn't produce nor destroy body mass, but she could stretch it. Move it. Shift it. Tonks's bones were not the foundation of her body; Tonks's bones were as susceptible to her will as the tree hairs on her head, which she just so-happened to change almost daily.
"Tell me you're not going out in public like that."
Her mother, Andromeda, a stiff, formal woman who sometimes liked to spoil Tonks with what some people would deem simple signs of affection, was standing in her doorway and frowning.
Tonks was in her bedroom. The bedroom she had lived in as long as she could remember. The bedroom that, now that she was almost twenty-two, seemed almost embarrassing.
"I'm not going out in public like this." Tonks turned away from the mirror, to face her mother instead of her mother's reflection. She dropped her hands, which had just been playing with her hair, to her sides. "I'm going to work."
Her mother frowned, thought-lines appearing on her forehead. "Don't they have a dress code at your office?"
"They do," Tonks said, pulling out her wand and Charming her stuffed unicorn, which usually lived amongst the pillows, and making it prance around her bed. "They do," she repeated, "but they hardly ever enforce it."
Her mother sniffed very loudly then, but said nothing else, as a sniff is a classy way of showing condescension without actually having to put effort into it. "Have breakfast at the very least."
"I can't, Mum, really." Tonks looked at her Chudley Cannons watch, the long hand with its Quaffle on the end, and the short hand with its Snitch, and she almost felt as if it were laughing at her, and not because the watch was Charmed to laugh at you when you were late. "I should've left ten minutes ago."
"And what kept you? Your hair?"
"I honestly don't know why it bothers you so much."
"It bothers me because you have a respectable job, and you dress like a – "
"A what, Mum? I'm waiting for you to finish that thought."
"Then you're going to be even later than you already are because I won't." Her mother smiled that rare smile that brought out the kindness of her eyes. "It's far too early for me to be literate."
"Articulate."
"That too."
"I'll see you later, Mum."
"You're leaving terribly early." Andromeda craned her neck to look at the clock on the fireplace mantel. "Why don't you just pick a closer Apparation point, Nymphadora? Or Floo, for Merlin's sake!"
"Floo makes me ill. And I like to walk through town. Keeping up with the Muggles is important."
"Don't remind me. Your father insists that we go to the Indian place for our anniversary."
"That place is good."
"Yes, but then we always go out to watch a film and watching those big people always makes me ill."
"So then go over to Gran's and watch the telly. Little people."
"Someday, Nymphadora, you're going to understand that in-laws are not particularly welcome guests at anniversary celebrations."
"Is that a subtle jab at my social life?"
"Subtle?"
"Look who's suddenly good with language! Look, Mum, seriously, I've got to leave. Promise me you won't double up on the wards again."
What had been a playful conversation, and, quite frankly, the nicest one in a long time between Tonks and her mother, suddenly took a downcast turn. That light that Tonks yearned to see in her mother's eyes, that flicker of something that she tried so hard to evoke, vanished. Her mother looked sadder and older than ever.
Tonks searched for something to say, but words escaped her. She sighed and scratched at her neck. Andromeda sighed and ran a hand through her black, greying hair. Then she resolutely walked over to her daughter and gave her a hug.
"I'll see you later," she said to Tonks's ear.