Chapter 3: Spaghetti Skies
I returned home to a sky swabbed with blackness. I made my way across the green inlet, up the swishy steps, and back to my dorm. I wasn't even sure why I left in the first place. Sirius's cat Laila sat against his bed forming a dimple in the sheets. She was a Tokinese with fur the color of mushrooms, as smooth as plexi-glass. She wore mismatched eyes: one blue, one brown. "One for every occasion!" Sirius insisted. Often times I loved her for her silence, for the waddle of her tail and the pudgy inside of her stomach.
I sat watching the space above Sirius' bed, trying to read the language webbing his walls. He had written song lyrics and book quotes, hundreds of tiny letters scrawled against fading white paint. It had been crafted over years, added to slowly and carefully. When I was upset I usually found my way there. I read through the quotes until I found one that matched my mood. It was our very own wailing wall.
The words were written in an assortment of inks and lead. Some were penciled in and others dipped from quills. There were different hand-writings, different sizes and boldness's but all we could see was the same loopy script speaking volumes of our uncertainty. It was written in no particular order: there were small sayings written slanted and sideways, leaving empty gaps like the space between clouds. It was a montage of thoughts and feelings, a patchwork quilt that was cobbled out of philosophy, stitched together with our misguided hope.
It had stayed there since first year, god knows how. I think the House Elves saw it for what it was. They read it as a cryptic poem. To them it was a tribute to the life of wizards, though they couldn't read a word of it. Every now and then one of us would wander over to the wall and silently inscribe our thoughts, etch them into the very walls we inhabited. It was a scribbled shrine in the making, a map of our lives.
My favorite was still a quote by a young Robert Frost:
Lovers, forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze.
Sirius erupted from the doorway, his hair long and rippled. "What are you doin' mate? Trying to soak of some of my esscence, eh."
"Just thinking."
"I see you've been trying to steal my lady," He feigned indignation as he slid up against the side of the bed and picked up Laila, spilling through his hands. He sighed "I think I need a bit of a nap."
"Its 8:00 mate, you can go straight to sleep if you'd like."
"Is that so?" Sirius always retained a calm demeanor. His voice was low and steady. His tone hardly ever changed, it always had the same rhythm, the same slow manner.
On the occasional weekend I would find him holed up in our dorm room reading Carl Sandberg's poetry or streaming his way through the books surrounding his bed. Most of the time he seemed vaguely bored, like he was weary of such an ordinary life. His self-acquired charm and natural distaste for authority made him a fine individual. He was mellow and open-minded. He loved the Rolling Stones and incense and often he seemed much older than I was. He seemed, above all, wise.
"God, can you believe that tomorrow is Monday? The beginning all over again." Tomorrow was indeed Monday. It was Quidditch and work and class. It was watching Lily twist her hair into ringlets, and seeing her waft through the hallways. My weekdays were jagged and planned-out, they were unceasing.
"Happens every week doesn't it? It's always Monday again." Sirius ambled into sleep shortly after while I sat up in bed drawing linen wands with deep shadows and drifts of caves. Peter and Remus arrived somewhere around 9:30.
"Studying." Remus announced. He looked tired and sallow; his pupils were large from the darkness, sinking into the lace of night-time.
Peter clambered into bed. "It's so cold in here. I mean, my feet are freezing!" He huddled beneath his bedspread. "Don't you wish that there were little blankets that you could just, I don't know, just place right above your feet, and you could tie that down like Gulliver's Travels?"
"Yeah Pete, that would be pretty groovy. But hey, what about, oh I don't know, Socks?"
He blushed slightly "Yeah but I can't sleep with socks. They are so hot and confining! It's like little straight-jackets for your feet, y'know? I mean, they just drive me crazy."
"Oh because little tents for your feet are much better." We all had a good laugh from that. Peter's quirks were so distinct; he was a spirit of idiosyncrasies and over-contemplation. His parents' were watchful, almost to the point of suffocation. They tried to stifle any defective qualities he had, wanted him to be a good person. They forced him to realize that there were consequences for his unsavory actions, but in doing so made him believe that there were consequences for all of his actions. He was perpetually thinking that he had done something wrong; he was constantly aware of who was watching. He was also light-hearted and attentive. He loved humor and privacy as well as dessert and the sticky heat of summer.
Years later when he became weary of the needs of others and began to live his life in the open, I took it as his rebellion. He smoked cigarettes in front of his parent's and contracted some incurable virus. He walked into rooms cursing, wearing lavish suits he couldn't afford. He discarded all the rules he once lived by, if only to exist as the one person he used to fear. We were baffled as to where the teenage boy who loved carrot cake and comic books had gone, but we all believed that it was merely transitory.
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I rose early for Quidditch, wiping the patches of sleep from my eyes. I was hushed and syrupy during the mornings, eating breakfast alone and watching the pace of my day quicken.
The Quidditch pitch was boundless with green, ringed with tall stands and hovering in a globe of nature, of purity. It was mid-march and everything felt slow and surreal, steeped in the knowledge that things were changing. When I looked up through the sky I always felt mildly surprised to notice it. It felt strange to watch the swamp of clouds align into rows of pallor, watery with halos. The air looked flaxen most days, like spaghetti strings looping past me. Most people told me that they saw shapes in the clouds but my skies were cloaked in arcane messages and lost souls swimming through stone.
Quidditch was, for me, somewhat nondescript. It was the only thing that I was instinctively good at. It resided in the catacomb of my past lives; it sprung from the willows of foresight. Often times I wasn't aware because of the highly innate quality. I felt my fingers clasp around my broom, felt the yelp of wind, followed jumpy orbs with my eyes. I did it all to the point of numbness. I hardly felt myself breathe during those hours spent up in the sky; it was all sensation and dulled notions.
I flew through blindness. It was the ultimate escape; everyday I could just ebb into the grass and churn in the stands, give my thoughts a rest. It had built strange muscles along my torso, slipped strength under my arms and along my ribs. Suddenly with that body I could win fist-fights effortlessly and soak in sweat until I could hardly move. Quidditch eliminated the power of my body. I trained my flesh to pulse with the wind and move when I willed it to. It gave my control over the only tangible thing in my life, left me with one less worry.
Remus watched us practice sometimes, typically a few days before the full moon. He could have made the team but his wealth of sick days and puzzling disappearances would be unacceptable. On occasion he would haul Peter and Sirius along with him, crafting one of the most soothing sights I can recall. Remus leaned up against the scruffy wood feeling complacent. Sirius sitting with a book in his hands making jokes every couple of minutes and watching me with a sloppy half-smile. Peter looking supremely concentrated, his brow furrowed as the plays shifted between us. The image of the three of them sitting in the early light of dawn was framed in my memories as how things should be, their silhouettes bleeding against the bleachers.
Remus loved rocks. The windowsill above his bed was lipped in rocks that he had found along the grounds. They were glassy, or rough. Brown, pickled, broken, pointed, round, smooth, cracked in half. When he was a child he would sit in vats of stones running his fingers along their edges, plunging his hands beneath their rubble and wearing the pebbles like rings. He had explained it to me a long time ago, told me that he loved rocks because they were classifiable, and pure. Rocks were explainable with their dusted beauty and blocky names. Rocks had no emotions and no worries, all they had was an inert past. Rocks, as he told me, never changed.
He confessed that he wanted to be a geologist someday, a fitting career. I could picture him making sprawling lists of data, and letting his eye bulge from behind calibrated magnifying lenses. He would wear chunky eyeglasses and handle the rocks with such delicacy because he loved them in the way the Sirius loved Laila, and Peter loved privacy; in the way that I loved Lily.
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That night at dinner I reflected on my best friends, those three strange boys who I shared my room with, who I knew too much about. They were unanimously flawed, but their intricacy astonished me. My life was seemed plain in comparison, far more compartmentalized. I lived on Quidditch, food, and regularity. I wasn't sure how much of a life I would have without them. How on earth would I spend my time without Sirius' Wailing Wall, Remus' rock collection, and Peter's assortment of sweets tucked in a crate below his bed? If it weren't for them, for Laila and that open space buried in the forest, who would I care for?
They were all awe-inspiring because of the demons they fought and the wars they waged. Sirius wrestled against his family and his obligation, Peter against the stern teachings of his parents and his own fear, Remus against his lycanthropy and the alternate egos he populated. I was left raging against my own thoughts.
That night with my eyes crystallized and my thoughts humming amid questions of the future, something changed. I sat on the sturdy bench beneath the tides of yellow candles looking out at the crowd of my peers, smiling and eating-oblivious enough to be living. My eyes snagged on the oval of Lily's face. She was laughing at something, her chin quaking with mirth. She held perfect posture, and patted her hand against the table like a tribal drum. Then, in a split-second I saw her glance over at me. I watched the intensity of her eyes lock with mine, as she smiled daintily. It was a gaze meant for spring bliss, for being outside and falling in love. She saw me, if only for a second, she saw me.
I should have known that it was the beginning of something. I should have understood the spark in that smile, the possibility it hid. I should have seen it in the sky, sailing in the grass. I should have known that things were changing.
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