Amaranthine

Chapter One: Infatuation

It was the spring of 1975 when I first became infatuated with Lily Evans. Her spiraled red hair was untraceable in the way that she herself was. I could never follow her and most of the time her memory was based purely on essence, on dreams. Her features lay thick in my mind; the pallid skin draped with a thin sheet of freckles, thin torrid legs that were always bare, and her listless eyes illuminated like embers, out of boredom rather than thought.

It came as an unspoken agreement, a pact that we never quite agreed on. She dominated my thoughts with the sound of bells murmuring her name. When she was gone I dreamt of her, when she was present I absorbed her every move, drank in her words like wine. In the mornings when she would stumble into the common room with dark bags hung below her eyelids and baggy clothing radiating her thinness I sat in the puffed leather chair reading the same book day after day, watching her, hoping to catch a glimpse that meant something, that would help me dissolve her mystery.

She did things, all things, in a manner that I couldn't even comprehend. Each movement laced with glamour, dripping with an unseen elegance that I could never trace back to anywhere but the sky. Watching her eat was intoxicating; my thoughts became instantly stagnant. She held the spoon between her thumb and her forefinger and pushed the small bites of food into her mouth, coaxing them inside her. She cut meat ravenously with the knife biting down to the plate with fervor. Everything about her sent me into a trance, left me flailing only in my own imagination--a bottomless trough of days that had never happened and things I never really knew.

My days were commandeered by hallucinations of kissing her, of watching her lift her skirt. My hormones were rampant of images of her. Things that were seemingly not erotic sent me into a tizzy. Lily sitting at her desk, her skirt bunched up, plain view of her thigh. Lily bending forward to grab a book, a quick flash of her pearly bra. Lily flirting with the cooks, her ankles twisted together, her back arched. My unrequited love ached and grew wider as the days past, much like a tumor.

I can remember a day when all of us were sitting in our room. I lay on my unkempt sheets looking up at the ceiling watching the cracks bend into images of lawnmowers and female lips. The room smelled bitterly of pot as clouds of smoke coiled in between our beds. The Beatles oozed from the radio.

All the lonely people, where do they all belong? All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

The sorrow in those words reached me and a hazy vision of Lily toppled my thoughts. It was all so clear now: her blinding woe, her emptiness. All this time she had been calling for me, screaming to be saved from her lackluster life of glamour and charisma. She was miserable and I could save her.

That was how it began: as a quest that sprung from infatuation, as something that quickly deepened into obsession which lead me to a prime fixation on a girl I had never known. My love was bending between orbitals up in space, swirling amongst harmony and God's fingers, untouched by reality. Something as fine and malleable as tears. In my dreams she loved me back and knew the curves of my ankle, knew every molecule of lust dividing my blood and how all of it could belong to her, how most days it already did.

I watched her play in the snow with drops of ice clinging to her hair the way I clung to her, to the Lily that existed purely in my mind's eye. She walked the halls as if they were a runway and I watched her, saw everything she wanted me to, understood how much she needed me and how much, in return, I ached for her. Our relationship, much like my love, was intangible. It was hollow to the naked eye for it was something that existed on a level far deeper than one could see, miles beneath the earth's crust. Our love resided in the world of possibility; a place more pure and more immaculate than fallen angels, more devastating than wishes left unanswered.

So I spent my time trying to find her, to understand the woven tentacles of her womanhood, of her petty existence and the meaning behind those mossy, lethargic eyes that I ingested during class and memorized at night. I grew up behind the screen of my delusion and watched my self wither into a walking, beating, throbbing item for her to grasp, for her to finally see. I let myself be as transparent as water hoping that one day she would seize the opportunity that I had so meticulously crafted for her, that maybe one day far off in the future she would notice me looking and for the first time I would see her look back.

I laughed at jokes that she never spoke and breathed in secrets she wasn't yet aware of. I watched the clothes gripped against her body and swallowed the various lines and circles of her too-much makeup, like a freckled Madame Alexander doll. I raised my voice to answer for her in class and shuddered in ecstasy when we came in contact at all. I watched my windows hum with her presence and heard feminine voices whisper in her lilt, fast-paced and unanalyzed. In the night I kissed pillows pretending to be her and listened to her every word, hoarding information in case one day she left me all alone. I spent hours trying to visualize her laugh or brush my hair so I looked more like the boyfriends she had and discarded. I did countless things all in the hope that she would find me in the way that I had found her, that she would love me wholly and entirely as she did in my thoughts.

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Chapter 2: Ferris Wheel Speech

Most days I woke up to the sound of adolescence. Those ticking time-bombs of words seeping into my silence, erupting into a fit of messy beats that sounded more like quail wings wagging through moistened air or the clicky speech of tribal people with soot-stained skin. The language was almost unintelligible, something spidery and water-logged that you listened to from the top of a Ferris wheel. I must assume that all those lengthy, conversations that pedaled between my roommates are inscribed in my psyche. All those words spoken before I was awake must be wedged between the smell of bread and the lyrics to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

I was notorious for my late awakenings; my slow, putty sleep that never really came. I was classified as an insomniac in the way that everyone is: hallmarked by one bizarre word that seemed to encompass the general view of an affliction. Werewolf, wizard, playboy, masochist, liar, dreamer, insomniac. All those words wadded together, stamped by the virtual “everybody” that seems to loom in youth. All those words surging around me, churning with their uneven edges and protruding designs; all the things those words didn't capture. They were patterns that lofty souls could follow if they were not fortunate enough to care. Most times when I was asked why I didn't sleep I said “I am too busy thinking.” It's an answer that is honest enough. I have too many billows of possibility to consider, too many thoughts to think and worries to worry.

It woke up one morning and I happened upon a vision, a replayable scene that sagged in my consciousness. It was in the midst of early and afternoon, the calm of the in-between-hours that everyone seems to misplace as the days go on. I still felt soggy from my lack of sleep, frosty as underexposed film. I staggered down steps and my limbs knew inherently, that were encrypted in my modes of too-tired or too-busy.

I found her standing below the steps with her hip slouched and her full height bent. Her hair was down with delicate curlicues at the end. Her skin was nearly transparent, so soft and pale that it looked like cashmere. The bridge of her nose and her forehead were greasy. A purple-brown halo was forming around her lifeless eyes, sliced like the rings of antique trees. She looked both frustrated and indifferent, a venerable feat. I wasn't sure if she was speaking to the boy standing next to her or watching for the loop of Venus in the window.

The two of them lingered like shadows along the frame of the door. The boy was tall with stringy limbs and arms that looked like vintage canes. He stood above her but the rust-colored hair along her back and web of veins littering her eyes made her look fierce and almost entranced. The hazard of those shifty parties she appeared at, blinking like a dot.

I watched them through the hollow of steps, a mirage of colored crystals, staring through a kaleidoscope haze. She thrummed her fingers against the solid bone in her hip; I tried to memorize the beat. Soft soft loud, hard soft, soft loud. I struggled to translate that beat into my silence, my unkempt daydreams. The sight of her, that grainy illusion of her heart-shaped lips and the hair lolling along her neckline made me woozy, almost queasy with fullness.

They both looked miserable; unshaped and too quiet. I thought of how different it would be when we were together. We would stand in that same doorway but I would push her up against the curled wood, outline her lips in mine and tell her that she was beautiful. I could picture us lying in bed together, watching the sun sink into far off glaciers, our teenage hearts vibrating.

I scaled the steps falling heavier and heavier against each platform. The wood was spongy and worn, a trailway of flesh. I passed them, staring at my shoelaces and the mousy stone beneath them.

She spoke to him in whispers, low and confidential. “I just, I just can't do this anymore.” It was a line plucked right out of a movie script. I knew that I was in the midst of another break-up and I knew that this referred to their relationship but something about the way she said it indicated more. Lily said that word like the nameless, stringy he knew precisely what she meant. The tone, high-pitched and weedy, signified the hundreds of thousands of reasons behind it, junkyards full of reasons.

I walked through the common room, down the lacquered marble steps and out into the air. I didn't hesitate along the path of grass, just hiked for yards along the green flooring following an unnamed map. I entered the Forbidden Forest into a thicket of wooden pillars and dead leaves. I sat on a log overlooking the only pond held within those phantom walls. I had spent much of first year searching the grounds for solitude, looking through abandoned staircases and unopened rooms for somewhere that was isolated. Once I stepped foot into this monotone sphere I'm not sure I ever really left.

I didn't name it corny things like “My happy place!” or “Potter's Hideaway!” I let it be what it was, let it stay clandestine. I went there when my mind was uneasy and sat for hours watching my own reflection smudge with the wind.

With stubs of wood I carved images of Lily's eyes in the silt tracing the circuit of veins connecting at every point. For days after that all I did in class was draw those glassy, vein-riddled eyes. I drew pages filled with them, staring back at me reddened and sovereign. I outlined them over and over again until the blackness bled through the paper and it still wasn't deep enough, it never would be. I traced their outsides until my fingers ached and stared at the waves of eyeballs looking at me though inky lashes. Every sheet of notes was speckled with those eyes. They were up in the corner or along the margin; on the front, back, top, left. They were squiggled in-between words and doodled inside textbooks. Her eyes haunted me. They appeared along the rim of my dreams, splattered like red saucers. They were inflated and shrunk, dipped in color and blanked into nothingness, into red fields of eyes that I couldn't escape.

I had been present during one of her many break-ups. It felt surreal for the most part. I saw Stringy He on occasion. At dinner with a wilted face picking at his food, looking around, sighing uncountable, innumerable sighs. Walking to his next class, clutching books with whitened knuckles, snaking through the crowd.

I couldn't help but feel sorry for him because that was her effect. That's what she did to all of them. To all of us. She was addictive. You just couldn't forget the insides of her arms and that slow smile. Images of her ran deep in your psyche. There was her painted toes and floppy hair and even more intimately, her naked breast, her puckered lips. She was instilled in your character. Lily Evans had a way permeating the soul.

It was unfortunate, all that power that she held unwittingly. We were all fixated on her. We were drawn in by her beauty then mesmerized by her obscurity. She fit the form of murky shadows and answered back when we called her in our thoughts. She followed us through our dreams as we tried to find her outside them.

There were so many of us; gathering in hoards and reminiscing about her shaggy clothes (adorned most days in lace, ty-dye, fringes). She had a charisma that made every thing about her feel intimate, unshared. We lined up as suitors ready to polish her with praise, pepper her with love. We all clamored at her touch and shrunk away from that blatant, unblinking stare of hers.

But it was all words anyway, wasn't it? All these sundry sounds that went on for lightyears, which never stopped. There was the single-word labels and Lily's movie-made letdown. There was the sun-moistened flow of conversation and the words that subsisted in the womb of my imagination; the millions of words that were never said, never heard. I couldn't begin to fathom their number. There was a foreboding vastness to those syllable-split phrases that we all depended on, or didn't, lived by or forgot.

Along with all those words and all their meanings came the things that they implied. It was the subject matter they were bound to and the stereotypes they reinforced. Words were showing up everywhere now just as I had lost all of mine. They filled journals, newspapers and books, notes, letters, songs, voices. They spawned creation and mangled flesh. Words were bullets you never died from. They lingered with you till the day you died and even past then. Once they were said they were never retracted, only haply misplaced from time to time.

It was hard to think about all my conversations, all that speech bleeding from the seams. I sat on that rotting log thinking about words and looking down at the hieroglyphics of teenage woe: the deep, sand-crusted diary of an girl through the eyes of her unrequited lover. The more I reflected on the verbal side of life the less was excluded. The cosmic quality sent me reeling. All this thought of words was noxious because I knew so many of them, spoke so many words throughout my lifetime but I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out the right ones to make her love me.

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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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Chapter 4: The Great Escape

I had officially sworn off alcohol (something fairly common between the four of us) once I woke up Saturday morning under the fiery lens of a hangover. After spending the better hours of Friday night throwing up on the stiff, chilly floor of the Hog's head restroom I was certain that I would never drink again.

Saturday's sun was ribbed with nectar while the clouds blew kisses across the east end of the castle. Years later I would remember that day; it was the weathered smiles of my classmates and sunscape licking the walls.

I wasted the afternoon hours reclining in a bed of pillows. The four of us swept in and out of the room. We were everywhere at once; engulfing the kitchen, walking to the library, taking a nap. We were dispersed through the school standing tall next to librarians and house elves. We didn't speak much, mostly floated through the hours in a fog.

Remus, Peter and Sirius converged at the door checking their pockets for cash and rubbers. Sirius yawned as he picked hairs off his coat and grimaced at his nails. Bored by profession.

“We're off.” Declared Remus.

“Where to?”

“Pub, time to fill our mugs and drown our worries mate.”

“Oh how I've missed my good friend Jack Daniels.” It was Peter's favorite saying. He always found a way to worm it into the conversation on the days we went out drinking.

“C'mon Pete, is that the best you can do?”

“Wetting the whistle, loading up, eating some yeast, bending an elbow” His voice blew deep and animated “Getting buzzed on suds”.

They left in a jumble with voices trailing like shadows. Sirius joked about his dry spell calling himself “The Randy Man” as Peter griped about a potions assignment gone awry. Their voices dulled with the distance until they were too rutted to distinguish.

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I was nomadic most days; always roaming from place to place sifting in-between walls, traversing fields and spanning hedges. I couldn't stay still even in my dreams. At night I was scaling the edges of raw, frosted mountain ranges or submerged in a marine strata probing for puka shells and oysters. At best I was scatter-brained; at worst I was profoundly lost.

The hallways were slick with silence. I wasn't used to being so alone. Around nine o'clock I wandered down to the common room. A portrait called to me in the hallway her voice layered and sing-song. "All alone on a Saturday night? What a shame! Where are those friends of yours, Luppin and Pettibrew?". It wasn't something I planned or thought about; it wasn't even something I could feel happening. It was something mapped by the fates, their singed laughter burning holes through the sky.

Even from far off I saw her. I recognized the tawny hair, burnished and sloped to the side. My whole body jolted. The surprise clung to my throat, pulling daggers against my tongue. Lily Evans sat no more than a few yards away from me in the common room gazing at the fire place. Her knees were pressed together with her feet curled outward. Her elbows were resting in her lap and her hands were clasped around her chin. She sat like a bored school girl, a pose well-practiced. I was immobile.

She sat on the wide, scorching red sofa that reminded me of Scarlett fever and meadows of bleeding poppies. Slowly, without breathing I made my way to a leather chair. We sat in the stillness watching the fire bubble and shatter and implode. The colors wove together and bled upwards forming a cloth. It felt like so long sitting in her presence with my heart smashing at every beat.

I could see her peer over at me, tilting her head to the side. She rolled her eyes along my shirt and across my mouth, drinking in the color from my cheeks. Suddenly a voice flamed from her lips. It was muted and battered in the night-time air. “I wish I was messed up.”

“I, uh, I have some stuff upstairs.” With my stomach pandering I spoke those first six words to Lily Evans in the hollow of the Gryffindor common room under the silvery hue of night time.

“Cool.” Lily Evans was not like other girls. She didn't ask what stuff I had or who I was. She made no attempt to be coy and insist that she really didn't want to trouble me. She gave me no strange looks or embarrassed apologies. She simply smiled at me and said cool.

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I walked behind her watching her head bob up the steps and climb through the igloo of stone pasted all around us. She walked along the corridors, twisting back to ensure I was still there. I pulled at the hinge of our door letting us into the abandoned room. Things were strewn everywhere, bed sheets still wrinkled and empty bottles tipped along the floor. The stillness felt man-made, held down by glue and pliers. She walked around the room caressing the walls with her fingers and touching the wood of our bed posts, the dilapidated cloth of our textbooks and inkwells. I remember wishing that her fingers bled paint.

I sat on my bed and pulled out a petite, marble square. The edge was sleek with polish, the top sealed with tin. It revealed a clear bag of green foam. The pot curved and decked; patching together like a farm from the sky.

“You're James, right?”

“Yeah.” She nodded and my stomach shriveled into knots.

Lily bounced onto the bed next to me, climbing on all fours and then pressing her spine to the wall. She wore a sweatshirt and legs bunched in culottes. I suppose it should have felt more surreal to have Lily Evans sinking into my mattress and smiling absently with those big, pulpy lips. It should have, but it didn't. I had always believed that we would converge somewhere along the line, I was only waiting for her to surface.

I rolled a joint the way Sirius taught me in fourth year. Bent the edge in, dipped the weed into the cavity, pulled towards me rolling tightly. I licked the side and sealed it, winding the edges in. She watched over my shoulder as the paper morphed into a small white stick. “Smells good” She noted. Pot smelled strongly, it always had, but the exact aroma was impossible to pinpoint. Peter would always chuckle and insist that it smelled like heaven and Remus thought that it reeked of Indian Spice. My favorite was still Sirius' response “It smells like dead leaves and cum, that simple man”

Using my metal lighter I lit the edge and took a deep puff tasting the paper and the hot, sweet air. Lily inhaled sharply coughing now and then. The smoke sailed out of our lips in streams. “So, why aren't you out with your friends or something? It's a Saturday night after all”

“I could ask the same of you.”

“All my mates are off at the Hog's Head getting trashed and I didn't care to join them.”

She pursed her lips and talked directly at me, watching my eyes. “I know what you mean. It gets old after a while. It's the same people and the same thing every day and you just can't get away from it.”

“You could. I mean, if you really wanted to.” We passed the joint back and forth until everything slipped under a mist. I put on Pink Floyd because I thought it was classic, lit incense to coat the smell.

She turned her whole body towards me “So James,” She bit her lip, stifling a laugh. “How would you plan the Great Escape?”

“Hm. I would probably go to the Galapagos or maybe Costa Rica. Somewhere warm. And you?”

“I would find some random guy and run away to an island, just never look back.” The way she talked about leaving was so wistful. “I wouldn't say goodbye to anyone.”

“Why would you go with a,” Cough “A random guy?”

“Because I already know the people here, I've already fallen in and out of love and it's not so great. I wouldn't want any complications”

“Mmmm.”

“Hey James, you could be my random guy,” She laughed. “My fella.” The thought of following Lily through her fictitious journey made me elated. I could picture us walking through green island forest, slipping our arms around the air, living among beaches. “We could just, run away.” I knew that she didn't love me, not even close. She was charming, she was flirty and I happened to be the object of her interest at the moment. It was thrilling.

“Seems like you've thought about this.”

“Once or twice.” Silence. “God, I'm so hungry. I could eat fish or a cow. Whatever that bloody saying is.” She laughed. I had forgotten how giggly girls got when they were high. I could feel her laughter piling onto me, sinking onto my chest like hot weight, soft and pliable. She giggled at everything and it wasn't a bad thing because her hair fell out of her bun and her teeth showed when she laughed like that.

“Do you want to go down to the kitchens or something?”

“No need.” I knelt in front of Peter's bed.

“James,” She called from across the room. “You realize that you are sitting on the floor, right?”

“Yes.”

“What, are you looking for his dirty mags or something?”

“Not quite.”

“Mmm.” Her smile curved floppy.

I slid a large crate veined in black plastic from under the bed. “Peter's sweet supply.”

“My goodness, you are so well-equipped.”

“I try.”

“Evidently.” Mounds of laughter pressing against me.

_______________

My bed was flushed with candy-wrappers. Crayon colors swept the sheets; macaroni yellow and summer sky pink. There were fluorescent greens and half-eaten candies like cauliflower weeds. They all sat there tending to our hunger, weighing on our stomachs.

Without warning Lily jumped up "James, let's go outside."

"Why?"

"It's so dark and cool out there, don't you want to feel it? Even for just a minute?" I could tell that her impaired state of mind gave her visions of grandeur. She pulled at my hand, at the door knob, at the railing. I could feel her pulling at my edges from every angle. I was unraveling at her touch.

We crept down the steps. Without the slightest hesitation she ripped the door open into the liquid black air. "Come on!" She spoke in stage-whispers. Despite the fact that it was past the time allowed for leaving the building and the fact that it was as cold as ice outside, I followed her. I would have followed her for light-years if I could.

Her legs pranced among the grass, she was looping and swerving. She was running farther and farther from me. "C'mere!" She waved her hands but all I could think about was their thin, flat shape. How her fingers were extruding from the very soul I wanted to find. I jogged after her in the darkness. As soon as I came near she would start running, begging me to chase her, to catch her. We ran in circles, in diamonds and squares and triangles. We covered every shape forming squiggled lines of footsteps; an abstract doodle that sealed and swished within itself.

She dropped to the ground heaving with a rasp in her breath. The air smelled feverant, the hints of fire and charred ingredients speaking of ill-mastered spells and unwanted urses. I stood a few yards away thinking, really thinking for the first time that whole night. I was here with Lily Evans, the girl that I spent so much of my time trying to deconstruct. Here she was lying on the grass, pulsing with breathe. I was suddenly overcome with the urge to throw up. It was not actual throw up but one of those deep, sinking feelings imbedded in your abdomen; clawing at you. I could not believe that it was happening. I simply could not comprehend how after all these months and years of waiting she was sprawled out in front of me with the bottom of her shirt skidding up to expose the white skin of her stomach.

That night became not only a turning point but a point of reference. Everything was either before or after that night. There was other relationships, events, moments; there were memories and personality changes that all existed in sects relating to the night where I first felt the real Lily Evans. It was the beginning and the end, the midpoint of change that I always swung back to, that I always remembered.

She patted her hand against the plot beside her, beckoning for me to sit down. I did, pressing my whole body to the earth waiting for it to swallow me whole.

"So."

"So."

“If you could,” We lay side by side. “Change one thing about the world, any one thing, what would it be?” I learned that in addition to being a reckless flirt Lily Evans had a habit of asking arbitrary questions. I did, and would always, try to answer them.

“I, I guess I couldn't just change one thing. I'd have to change everything.”

“How poetic.”

“It's true. Things don't just change so quickly, they're all linked.”

“Like Jenga.”

I nodded, laughing. “Like Jenga.”

“So you wouldn't change anything?”

“Nah, it wouldn't be worth it.”

“I guess you're right. I mean our world is so fucked up I wouldn't know where to start.”

“Fucked up indeed.”

“Think about it. Everyday people get murdered and raped and robbed and beaten. Everyday there's some alcoholic husband beating his wife or pervert running amok. Our world is beyond sick. I can't walk down the goddamn street at night without being terrified that something is going to happen.”

“What are you scared of?”

She scoffed. “Everything. I'm scared of stereotypes and death; I'm scared of not really living my life, of never falling in love, of missing all my chances. I'm scared of disappointment and being alone. I'm scared of motherhood, of the future. And I mean all of it in that abstract sense. I'm terrified of everything, but only below my skin. Only deep enough so that it doesn't show.”

The eloquence with which she spoke surprised me. For such a pretty girl she spoke like a scholar, like some rice-paper deity. I had never known Lily Evans to be someone plagued by fears and I would come to learn that she wasn't. Though all those words detailed her worries, in her real life they were few and far between. It must have been the pot and the celestial black because it turned out to be one of the few nights she ever spoke of those fears, that she let them swallow her.

“You're lucky.”

“Oh and how is that?”

“Well, all your fears are reasonable, they're understandable. They're more irrational than anything else.”

“I don't think fears can be irrational.”

“Maybe not.”

“What are you afraid of? It's probably a lot more rational than you think.”

“I have those normal fears, being alone and all, but there are others. I'm scared of forgetting my friends, like one day I'm going to pass them on the street and not even recognize their voice. I'm terrified of dieing in my sleep. I'm practically scared of sleep itself. And I guess my biggest fear,” I looked her straight in the eye for the first time that night, for the first time in my entire life. “Is that my soul mate will never find me.”

She looked feral, blinking and chewing on the skin of her lip. “Those aren't so unfounded, they're just specific. I mean, it's brave to know exactly what you're scared of. Me, I'm just stuck with these wishy-washy fears. You're the lucky one James.”

“Must be that old Gryffindor courage, eh?”

“Guess so.”

She paused. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Yeah, one sec” I strained to read my watch in the dark. “It's 11:15.”

“Well I should probably be going.”

“I, alright.” Blades tore at my throat. There was no way to stop her. All I could think was `what if this is the last time I find her? What if this is it?'

Her lips, as blushed and candied as grenadine, spoke in a lull. “Thank you James Potter, for being the great escape.” She sprinted across the grass, deserting me all over again. Her hair bounced further and further until the red looked black and her limbs looked clipped. I ambled to my room and fell into a gaping, dreamless sleep for the first time in years.

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Chapter 5: Table-top Thought

I spent the morning at the round table facing the window smoking cigarettes and coughing through crowns of smoke. I felt like my cousin. She was fourteen and staying with us for the summer. She got home late, turned to me and said “I lost my virginity,” as she sat at our table chain-smoking my mother's cigarettes, tears sitting in her eyes. She stared at me, pulling tobacco into her mouth “Do you think I'm a whore?” The complacency in her voice made me both anxious and unbelievably sad. I was too young to understand the question but I told her no.

Here I was doing the very same thing. I imagine generations of my family spent their worries sitting at tables-timber or plastic, carved, expensive, stained-smoking until they couldn't breathe. We were a set of deniers, sipping our pain with brandy and devouring mistresses half our age. The women were the same. They scrubbed the house clean of the welts of ex-husbands and disappointing children. Our bowels were spiked with glass. We were harmless until we were broken.

Sirius plopped onto a chair, straddling it backwards. “What's going on mate?”

I shook my head no. Nothing is going on.

“You sure `bout that? Because last I recall you don't smoke cigarettes.”

“I do now.”

“Alright, new vice. I'm down for that. Pass me one, yeah.” I pulled out a white-washed stripe; it looked like the missing piece of a picket fence. We smoked, feeling the tanged-brown substance dissolve, swept into our lungs and blood streams. I felt muggy and sick but I was too goddamn lost for anything else.

On one hand I had no clue how I felt, on the other I knew precisely. I didn't know how I should feel. I wondered if I should recount our conversations, because surely I could. Would I tell anyone? No, I couldn't. At least not yet. I wasn't sure how I would explain, how the words would form. I was like a bride mouthing “I do” in the mirror, words like vials dotting her thoughts my husband, married for three years now, on my wedding night.

At the same time, I felt raw. I expected to feel elated or fearful or empty, but I felt nothing of the sort. It was wrong, wasn't it? This pink, exposed emotion I was drowning in. It was as if layers of flesh like rock stratum were cut away. Her words were scalpels and knives, sloppy guns peeling off my skin, dragging away something heavy and wet. I felt not only naked but severed, cleaved into bits. I popped red and lucid but nobody could see it. Was I now some medical phenomena? Or had nothing really changed… had it all just been a dream?

_______________

Sunday was smoke and thought; it rose and curled, wept in balls before me. I didn't do any work, I couldn't. My notebooks and parchment and ink packets lay untouched. The thought of writing seemed absurd to me; school like some monstrous prank. How on earth could people work when there were women like Lily Evans who flirted you into oblivion, when there was sex like monster truck shows? How did anyone concentrate when love existed? It seemed blasphemous.

I entered class unprepared. Remus had thrown his potions essay at me “At least copy it,” but I couldn't see the point. The potions master, Mr.Marguiles, called across the room “Got your essay Potter?”

“James,” She called from across the room. “You realize that you are sitting on the floor, right?”

I said “No Sir.” He spoke half-heartedly “15 points from Gryffindor.” We were ordered to make a batch of Wellwerts Tilly (named after the creator), a mixture that soothed Wizard's Warts. I looked on hopelessly as Remus and Peter and Sirius read notes aloud adding question-marks and stewing over which to add first, looking befuddled and tired. They must have thought I was so selfish as I sat there with my chin on the desk, not helping, not even saying a word. But they were good friends, they didn't get huffy or yell at me to sit up and contribute. I felt guilty, but it was a restless half-guilt that I hardly paid attention to.

In my other classes I took notes on pages still bubble-stained with Lily's eyes. I tried not to look at her but when I did she was staring at her side, blinkless underneath the scotch-ceilings and quavered voices speaking in whispers and shouts. I felt like we were the only two people in the room, the rest were screaming masses, cells and cyclones of talk and breath. They knew nothing about profundity, about love.

_______________

At lunch I piled my plate with food, but I couldn't eat a bite of it. I was starving, but I was hungry in so many different ways that it seemed fruitless to feed one hunger and deny the others.

“I hate school.” Peter said exhaling loudly.

Sirius responded. “You know, there's a support group for that. It's called EVERYONE and that meet at the pub on Fridays.”

“Oh shut it.”

“How was the pub?” I asked, vying for normalcy.

“As good as one can hope for.”

“Very true Sirius, Fire Whiskey and weekends always produce something agreeable.”

“What did you do James?” Remus, always so kind.

“Nothing, just hung around the room.”

“Like a lump.” Noted Peter.

“Yeah, like a lump.”

“You need a girlfriend mate.”

“We all need girlfriends, yeah.”

“I say we set up some crazy tournament, name it something like `Win the Marauder's Hearts: A Journey'. We could have girl's running through tires shirtless and mud wrestling and competing in cook-a-thons.”

“Real classy Peter.”

“Thank-you Remus, I try.”

“My goodness, you are so well-equipped”

“I try”

I stood up “Excuse me guys, but I need a smoke.” Sirius looked up at me, narrowing his eyes to ask if I was alright.

“I think I'll join you.”

“Since when did you two become nicotine fiends?” Peter looked suspicious.

“Since yesterday, apparently.” Sirius answered for me. We walked out of the Great Hall and past chattering paintings, through the same door Lily and I escaped from.

“Where are you getting all these fags from on such short notice?” He seemed interested, mildly amused even.

“Amos Diggory,”

“Really? Didn't he used to date that Lily Evans girl?”

Lily Evans sat no more than a few yards away from me in the common room gazing at the fire place.

Yes. “No, no I don't think so.”

“I'm pretty sure they did. They were rather hot and heavy if I remember-”

“No. I'm quite sure they never dated.”

“Alright mate, no need to get all worked up by it.”

“I'm not worked up, I'm…”

“Yes, what exactly are you because I haven't the slightest clue.”

It was a hard question. I was ecstatic and anxious and deluded and changed. “I'm drained.”

“May I ask why? When we came home last night you were dead asleep, and that's a first.”

“It has nothing to do with that.”

“Alright,” He nodded. “Alright.”

_______________

After the roar of lunch died down I headed to Charms and then Ancient Runes. I slept in my classes, feeling depleted. I daydreamed not of Lily but of dry, monochrome rooms. Brand new walls thin as fingernails, floor a vivid, glistening wood. I dreamt about being clean and whole because, for the time being, I felt bloodied. I still felt unformed.

I took to analyzing my teachers. For Charms there was Mr.Heely, a large, elegant man who wore silver-rimmed spectacles and personally tailored suits. He always sat on a low stool and he slapped his knee when he laughed. He was a nice man, head of Ravenclaw for years. I had once appeared at his desk begging to change a failing grade. He held up a fat, wobbly hand and said “Alright my boy. No need to worry, no need at all.”

Our Ancient Runes teacher was named Juliette Kirkham (We felt scandalous knowing her first name, information passed on from someone's unknowing aunt.) Mrs. Kirkham was still very young, through not particularly attractive. She had bug eyes that sat too far apart, a nose that was flat but wide at the brim. She wore her hair in long, neat ponytails for as long as I could remember.

Three days later I was slumped at my desk in Ancient Runes watching her speak out of my peripheral vision. Sirius and Peter sat on either side of me (Remus attended Muggle Studies that period). I was contemplating what animal she resembled-an owl or a merekat-when I felt a finger dabbing at me, as soft as a paintbrush.

I spun around to see Lily Evans smiling at me, her skin covered in a sheath of freckles. They swallowed her face.

“Hi.”

In my head all I heard was `Shit. Shit. Shit.' But I managed “Hi…” It was unexpected. She was breaking the code, bringing that night out of our damp, hazed recollection.

She bent forward, almost giggling “Could I borrow a quill?”

“Um… yeah, sure. One sec.”

She paused. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Yeah, one sec,” I strained to read my watch in the dark. “It's 11:15.”

She was surrounded by her friends; a dark-haired girl watched the interaction. I pulled out a quill, handed it to her making sure our fingers didn't touch. “Thanks.”

I could still feel her watching the back of my head, caressing my hair and earlobes Those eyes were scalding hot. I was used to watching her-the details could have filled spiral-bound masses-but this feeling was different. It was uncomfortable and nerve-wracking. All I heard was the sound of a quill being tapped or scratching words.

I soon returned to the fizzy feeling. I wondered why I had been upset in the first place. I was wonderfully, blissfully raw. The air was sunny and budded, I spent my last Saturday with Lily Evans and a few minutes ago she solicited a quill. Things were road mapped and blooming with possibility. Hope as thick as lead gummed my thoughts. No wonder I was daydreaming about pure, clean rooms. I was simpler now. Instead of her deconstruction, I had taken part in my own.

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