I.
He left.
And that’s the first thing I remember.
After everything that happened, of course. Everything. Everything. You roll the word with your tongue, tasting it, chewing it to understand its value. A word that encompasses the universe and its molecules. Yet after a while, it doesn’t encompass anything anymore.
That’s how I felt. The opposite of everything. Void. Zero. Blank. Like an empty sheet of paper.
Waiting to be filled…waiting to be fulfilled…waiting to be…something, again. To someone. But does it matter anymore?
They say I became a different person when everything happened. Maybe everything sucked the life out of me. Yes, that’s it. It sucked the life out of me and left me crying inside for more. Crying like a baby, wanting its mama. Mama. Dad. Gwen.
He wrote me letters. Trying to fill my empty paper with his words. HIS WORDS. Not mine. Words. Another funny sound with no true definition.
I’ll give you everything, he told me. “Everything you could want.” And he spread out his arms, embracing the world around us, offering it to me like a gift, his mouth wide open in laughter, drinking in the world’s juices. And I believed him because of his embracing arms, the ones I felt so safe in. The ones I could trust him with. Because those arms entrapped the world for me, I believed the world was ripe for me to have.
But it wasn’t.
And that’s when everything happened.
---
- A few years before -
”I guess the carriages are waiting for us,” I murmured, spreading out my arms and legs over the warm summer grass and waving them, like a little girl does when she wants to make an angel in the snow.
Maybe the angel is trapped inside of me, trying to get out. Trying to escape from me.
”We have a little bit of time left,” James told me lazily, plopping down next to me on the ground. He reached out and traced his name on my bare arm. Invisible letters, to remind him that I’m his. Forever.
Forever?
”I want you to come over to my house for the summer, Lily,” said James, lying down on one side with his head resting on his upraised palm. His hazel eyes bore into me, kissing my insides. His firm, determined fingers continued to draw on my skin, circling around the tiny mole I have on the edge of my right shoulder. “I don’t want to wait until August.”
“But we’ll see other before then,” I reminded him with half-closed eyes. The sun’s beams were invading, too nosy into my conversation with James. The field beyond the Forbidden Forest, on the other side of the Quidditch Pitch, was wide open with no shade available at all, and James and I were the only ones there. Our little private place. In the wide-open field.
“But only a few days,” James said in impatience. “We’ll both have interviews with work. I’ll be starting my Auror training. You’ll be interning at the Wizengamot. We won’t have enough time to see each other.”
“We can’t have everything, James,” I laughed, my mirth breaking into the still, sticky air, surprising it.
Suddenly he jumped up with a renewed sense of energy, the spirit that I always admired in him bursting forth. He spread his arms out, the ones that had constantly shut out the fears and doubts from me, and leaned his head back, closing his eyes.
“I’ll give you everything, Lily. Everything you could want. Always.”
---
Everything. Always. What do those mean?
II.
“James, James, James,” I whispered, teetering each mouthful with heightened remorse and pain. Slowly I stretched my hands out in front of me, examining each finger critically. With that finger I look up each meaning of an old law that the Wizengamot will be using in their next case. And with that finger I touch the door ringer on Alice’s front door. And with that finger I used to trace James’s lips. The ones that told me, “Always.”
The beeping of the oxygen container droned in my ears. BEEP. Beep. BEEP. Reminding me that it’s there. How could I forget. I hear it in my dreams. And sometimes when I’m awake. How do you distinguish reality?
Looking over at the hospital bed in front of me, I sigh. She’ll never change. She’s been like this for two years. That’s reality.
The long coffee-colored curls that used to frame Gwen’s face were trimmed now to a bob, lifeless and staring at me. Like Gwen. Although her brown eyes are closed, I know she’s looking at me. Looking at me and asking, “Why, Lily? If you were there, why couldn’t you help me?”
I don’t know, Gwen. Maybe my angel momentarily left me. Maybe he stepped out for more important things to do. I don’t know.
Her face is chalk white. She looks dead. But no, Gwen’s not dead. But being in a coma for two years (63,072,000 seconds, 1,051,200 minutes, 17,520 hours, 730 days) is like being in a tomb. And visiting her for three quarters of that time is like visiting a grave. Only she has no epitaph except for the five-inch scar slashed across her cheek.
“Ms. Evans,” came a soft voice. A voice trying to be understanding, but not giving a rat’s arse whether it understands you. “Ms. Evans, it’s past visiting hours, dear.”
“I’m not a visitor,” someone answers. I soon realize it’s my voice, speaking for me, trying to mask whatever it is I’m feeling. “I’m Gwen Evans’s cousin. First cousin, on her father’s side. My father and her father were brothers.”
Dad.
“Yes, I understand, dear,” the nurse says in her sympathetic mode. “I know Gwen is your cousin, and I’m happy that you spend so much time with her. She needs that. She can hear you, you know.”
Gwen, can you hear me? Can you? Just wink like you used to.
“But even so,” the nurse sighed, patting her gray perm, “We do have strict regulations. It’s past nine o’clock. You can visit Gwen tomorrow if you’d like.”
“What I would like is for her to wake up,” I murmur, stretching out one finger to touch the tip of Gwen’s quilt. The quilt she and I had made, when we were hardly old enough to hold a needle.
“That’s what we all would like, dear,” the nurse yawns.
An unexplainable fury tore through me right then. How DARE she? How dare she presume that she understands? How dare she presume that she knows Gwen and I and Mum and Dad and Petunia enough to understand what we went through? What we’re still going through?
“HOW DARE YOU?” I scream at the nurse, who jumps back in terror. Exasperated with her admittance of a lack in feeling, I whirl around and slam the door behind me, stalking down the crisp hospital corridors, my chest heaving.
Maybe the door’s slam will wake Gwen up.
----
“Lily,” my best friend, Alice, says in concern. She always starts out her advice or sympathy (now, Alice knows what sympathy is) with saying your first name. I always escape by that time, but in the last two years I haven’t had energy to.
We were in her observatory, sitting down for tea. Alice loves tea. I hate it. Just an excuse to socialize. At least, that’s what I thought before. But now it reminds me of Mum, so I take tea whenever possible. Even when it’s past midnight, usually after I’ve woken up from one of my nightly, repetitive dreams. Or half-dreams, because they’re based on reality. How do you distinguish reality?
“I don’t know how you distinguish reality,” said Alice, in surprise at my random question. “I suppose…I suppose you sense it.”
“How?” I asked, stirring my tea with a dainty silver teaspoon. It had the initials A.M.K embossed in swirling script on its handle.
Alice looked flustered, and she sipped her tea as if it held all the answers. If that were true, I would’ve died from drinking too much tea a while ago. “I guess it’s a sort of seventh sense, if you want to call it that. You know what is real because you can see and touch it.”
“You can’t touch life. Or death. Or love. Are they real?” I said quietly. I wasn’t really asking since I already knew the answer.
But Alice wasn’t comfortable talking about these things. In fact, she always tries to divert me from such thoughts. “Lily,” she began again, carefully setting her porcelain teacup down onto its porcelain saucer. They fitted together perfectly. “Lily, I’m worried about you.”
I tried to smile. “You and the rest of my well-meaning friends.”
“It’s been two years, Lily,” Alice whispered, as if trying to remind me.
“Two years next Tuesday,” I corrected her, tapping my fingernail on the small glass table in between us. Tap. TAP. Tap. In rhythm with the passing clouds overhead that spied on us.
“Well then, next Tuesday,” Alice agreed. She was such a dear to agree with her half-crazed best friend. “The point is, you shouldn’t be like this. You’ve always told me to be frank with you, and I now will be. Most people think you’ve lost your mind. You never step into the magical world anymore except for work, and then you go right back to your flat in Muggle London. The only witch you visit is me, and that’s only because I threaten you to.”
I patted her hand in reassurance. “I don’t mind that you threaten me.”
“But I do,” Alice countered, shaking her blonde head. This time it was done in elegant curls. Curls like Gwen had, only neater and more controlled. “I don’t want to push you into visiting me. You’ve pushed everyone else away. The only people you really spend time with, besides those you see at work “”
“I don’t really see them,” I interrupted, caressing a jade-colored leaf that drooped over my shoulder. “I have my own office, apart from everyone.”
“-Are Gwen and your parents’ graves,” Alice finished, frowning at my disruption. “That isn’t healthy, Lily. What happened to the spirited Lily, the one who believed in life, the one who took care of the underdog, the one knew that actions speak louder than words?”
I stared at her, not bothering to hide the bitterness that I hid from everyone else. “That Lily is gone, Alice. GONE. She watched her parents and cousin being tortured in front of her eyes. She watched her parents yell in tearing pain until they couldn’t take it anymore and then DIE. Now her cousin has been in a two-year coma with no hope of waking up. Is that healthy? Is that reality? Tell me, so I can wake up.”
Alice remained silent, gazing at the dregs of her chamomile tea, trying to tell her best friend’s fortune “ or at least find the way she had lost. “No, it isn’t, Lily. I can never take away your pain, or try to tell apart what’s real in this fantasized world you’ve walked into.” Her blue eyes saddened as she looked at me, filled with unspoken words. “But the question is, do you want to wake up?”
-----
Do I want to wake up? That’s the question of my life.
I woke up when I saw my parents fall down dead in front of me. When I saw how Gwen was tortured so badly from the masked men, the ones who control the guillotine called death, that she was paralyzed. She fell into a coma from shock as soon as they left.
So I went back to sleep. To my own dream world. Where everything was blurred, like in one of those Impressionist paintings I saw in a street market. Since it was a copy, its existence was a fantasy as well. I didn’t want to open my eyes because then the dotted landscapes and dotted clouds of my world would mold into concrete things, solids objects…too cold. Too real.
Did I want to wake up? No.
I go through the daily routine we call life with rigid motions. I only bothered to stay at the Wizengamot because I didn’t want to look for another job. Besides, I have my own office, like I told Alice a week ago, and I don’t have to come in contact with anyone that I don’t want. I return to my flat, eat if I feel like it, sleep if I can, and then wake up (from sleep, I mean) and do the same thing all over again.
It’s dependable, my routine. The only thing I can count on now.
I used to be able to count on him. Before him, it was Alice, but best friends can’t substitute the one whom your soul belongs to. He still has it. That’s why I’m empty. Shake me, and you hear nothing.
I sometimes sit on my window seat in my tiny flat. It looks over Notting Hill, where I am, and if I lift my head just a little bit I can see Kensington Gardens. They look so much like the fields of Hogwarts, our private place. And the same stars that glisten in the velvet sky are glistening at him, wherever he might be. I wonder if they can send a message?
Stars, I say, give James a hug and a kiss from me. Tell him that I miss him. Tell him that I wish I could be with him, that I wish he could be with me. Maybe he can remind me of who I am. Do I want to be reminded?
Do you? The stars ask me.
I don’t know. Ask him if he knows who I am, though. Just to see what he says. Maybe he doesn’t know either.