Puzzle Piece Analogy

Puzzle Piece Analogy

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The room smells like Ron and Ginny. Which makes sense of course, because it was the Burrow after all, their home. It smells tangy like ginger and warm like vanilla and cozy like maple. Safe. Home. It makes this that much harder.

I'm sorry Mrs. Weasley, I might break your children's hearts.

He's sitting down; head hung low, elbows resting on his legs with his hands hanging uselessly between his knees. Messy hair looks messier. Glasses tilted. More shadows dancing across his face. He looks terribly defeated.

Hermione Granger, you've just destroyed Harry Potter. Congratulations.

But it was silly. All I did was ask for Ginny to leave so that I could have a few words with him in private. After her footsteps faded in the hall, we didn't exchange one word or gesture. I would be lying if I say that we weren't communicating though. Those unspoken words that hover above us in the cluttered room collide and stick together to form sentences that were too painful to say - sentences that would've cut our tongues on the way out.

Did it really matter so much to me? Was it really worth it?

No, I think as I try to unclench my jaws. It's not worth it.

Then what am I doing here? Why am I doing this?

Because I deserve to know.

“It almost time for lunch. We should go downstairs before Mrs. Weasley comes up and drag us down herself.” He says quietly. I didn't respond, still trying to will it out of him. He can talk around it all he likes, there's no way I'm going to let him off so easily. This was long overdue.

“I can smell the roasted chicken from here. It's going to be delicious as usual.” He pauses, still not looking up. His words fade into the dusty corners of the room, superfluous and meaningless. He licks his lips and tries again. “Ron and Ginny are probably-”

“Oh do shut up.” I even surprise myself sometimes. It comes out nasty and almost Slytherin-like.

He looks up at me for the first time then, green eyes dark with unhappy thoughts. Cheer up Harry, it's only me. “What do you want from me?”

“What have I always wanted, Harry?” I manage to get out. My throat feels uncomfortably restricted. “I want you to be honest.”

Honesty is the best policy. He was raised with muggles. He should know this too.

“I hate you.” He stands up fiercely and moves so that he is in front of me. I admit - against all those years that we've been friends and against all that I know about him - that in those few seconds, I expected him to strike me.

He doesn't of course, but the fact remains that I thought he would. He can see my face redden but he wouldn't know why. He would think it was because of what he had said and not because for the first time, I doubted him. Me of all people.

How did we come to this? We're falling apart in huge continental pieces and I don't know how to fix it. I've been gripping at the seams, trying to hold us all together and it only seems to loosen more ties and make the breakdown faster.

We're unravelling. Five years of friendship coming undone.

“I said honesty Potter!” I call him Potter. Not Harry, Potter. I know that he feels it too. We drift apart that much more. I can't help it. He's lying again, to my face. I guess it's really not so hard to lie when looking someone in the eyes.

Harry is hurting more now. I know he is. “I do hate you.” He says viciously. “I hate you so much.” The silence fills up the rest of our argument. A back and forth account of `he said, she said' talk. Then, “Because if I didn't hate you, more people will be hurt.”

Ron and Ginny. The other huge knot in this tangled web.

“The truth is,” Harry continues, his face losing the furious expression. “I don't. In fact, I-I seem to love you, sort of…rather desperately.”

What I should say now, is that things are better. I laugh and cry happy tears and we kiss and hug and kiss some more. He tells me that things will be fine and for the first time, I tell him, “I love you too.”

But that's not how it goes.

Instead of chasing away the shadows that haunt us, the confession seem to add to the numbers of darken eyes and sleepless nights. "I love you" doesn't make anything okay. He is still hurting and I am still crying. The tears are there along with the congested feeling and the stupid self conscious thought, I must look terrible right now.

So we stand there, staring at each other like the hurt little kids we are. Because at the end of the day, it's Harry with Ginny and Ron with Hermione. No Harry with Hermione in sight. We'll watch each other get hitched with other people, most likely become a godparent to each other's children, and grow old watching each other, but never quite being there to see it happen.

The end. Next life.

If it was any consolation though, we did hug. I don't know whether it was me or Harry that made the first move but we crash into each other so brutally that my heart clatters against my ribs and left both of them bruised. We are two pieces of a different puzzle trying to force a fit. It's such a hard embrace because we are both trying to steal comfort away from each other only to find that we have none to give and none to take. I can feel him chant words against my ear and I know that he was crying too.

“I wish I didn't. I wish I didn't.”

It's honestly the most hurtful thing he's ever said to me. He really means it. He really wishes he doesn't love me. It's okay though, I wish I didn't love him either. We might as well hurt each other altogether now. In a few minutes, we will have to be nothing but smiles and no worries.

“I wish you were her.”

Harry says it so ardently that I could feel my heart splitting into pieces. You see, unlike others, my heart doesn't shatter. It's not that useful. If it shatters, then I could at least use the sharp pieces to hurt people the way I was hurting. No, instead, my heart rips into huge bloody pieces of flesh: useless and squishy.

Maybe when this is all over, I'll feed it to Fluffy for being such a good dog.

“I wish you were her. I wish I was him.” He's losing all composure now and holds me tighter. We're both sobbing.

“No you don't.” I say, trying hard to keep my voice from cracking. “Stop saying things like that.”

“I do. I do I do I do.”

Stupid, what good does wishing do? I think angrily. It doesn't do anything.

Somehow, through the tears and sniffling and painful hugs, I hear a scuffle near the door. My brain goes on auto as I slowly untangle one arm from him even though Harry tries violently to keep my arm around him. I grab his wand and raise it to the door.

Alohamora.

It bangs open and Harry whirls around, arms still around me. What a horrible thing to have done. Ron and Ginny are standing there with a pair of Extendable Ears in their hands, angry and betrayed and irrefutably hurt.

Misery loves company. Come on in, we were just about to salt each other's wounds!

“This is disgusting,” Ginny declares. “In our own home too.” She grabs Ron's arm and drags him away. The footsteps sounds strangely like the cracking of Ron's, Ginny's and Harry's own hearts and the sickening squish of mine.

They shouldn't stomp so hard. They're only breaking them more.

I'm sorry Mrs. Weasley, we've just broken your children's hearts.

It was unfair. I can't help but think that we should all be happy. Not for me and Harry, but in general. We're the good guys remember? Good is suppose to triumph and the bad people are suppose to suffer. Malfoy should feel this shattered. Snape should feel this betrayal. Voldemort should feel this death.

They should feel like this, not the Weasleys, Potter and Granger.

I close my eyes and push my face into Harry's shoulder just as I feel him do the same to my hair. “W-why?” I ask with my voice breaking unpleasantly. New tears are stinging my eyes now. “Why do we all hurt so much?”

There's no reason to pretend anymore. I only have him to hold onto and he in turn can only clutch onto me. Perhaps this will be enough to keep our heads above the water, to keep us from drowning in our own grief.

“I don't know why.” He says softly. I hear his glasses crack on my head from pressing into my skull too hard. Or maybe that's his heart again. I don't know.

“It's because we're monsters, isn't it?” I try to joke around but fail miserably. I'm not the funny one, Ron is. And Ginny is the one who makes the sarcastic comments at the right moment. But they aren't here anymore. We are monsters. We're the ones that destroy happy endings.

There's no need to put on smiles. Like Ron had said, I'm a horrible actress.

I guess there is a Harry with Hermione now. I'm with him and he's with me. We're just fractured and messed up, like the puzzle piece analogy. We fit together perfectly, no rough edges or anything of that sort, but we're from different boxes and different pictures. Two pieces that don't belong together but by some accident, fit in a not-so-different way that was painful and anything but easy. So we stay together, despite the different prints on the front and that two whole puzzles are incomplete now.

I guess this makes us quite the destructive pair. Now that there's a Harry with Hermione, there's no Harry with Ginny or Ron with Hermione. We'll be okay in the end though.

We'll be just fine, even if “I love you” doesn't make anything better like it's supposed to.

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Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling in association with Scholastic Books, Warner Bros, etc.

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