In a silent corner of a deserted corridor, Neville Longbottom sat with his head on his knees. This wing of the school was rarely used and its shadows provided the perfect sanctuary for his grieving heart. A few salty tears made their mark on Neville’s black school robes, but he didn’t care; he simply shifted to the next driest spot on which to rest his aching head.
Echoes of students cheering and yelling rang and bounced off the stone walls and floors. It sounded like Gryffindor just won the match. Lovely. Such news would have been encouraging to Neville’s spirits had this not been one of the worst days of the entire year.
In the days preceding this most distressing date, Neville’s demeanor grew listless and an air of melancholy followed constantly at his heels. Sometimes he could convince himself that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance that November tenth would never come. This magical world he lived in was full of possibilities”there just had to be a way to skip directly from November ninth to the eleventh and bypass the tenth entirely. But inevitably, November tenth came every year.
This year it fell on a Saturday, the only even remotely good thing about this day. Saturday meant no classes, no professors, and no unwanted students to make this day worse than it already was. Saturday meant he could be alone with his thoughts and think about how much he missed his parents. It had been such a terribly long time since he lost them, and every year on this day he is reminded all over again.
Years ago, when Neville was just a young boy, his grandmother came to him with the awful news of the attack. Though he didn’t fully understand the depth of his parents’ injuries back then, he did have a keen sense of knowing that everything would be much, much different from now on. He had cried and cried in St. Mungo’s that day when his mother wouldn’t hug him because she didn’t know who he was. His father briefly tried to console the distraught boy, but even he had no comprehension that Neville was his only son. Frank and Alice Longbottom would never be the same again.
That was the worst November tenth of Neville’s life, and the first day he remembered crying. He does well not to cry on all the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, so that every November tenth he can let it all out in rememberance of the parents he will never truly know and the tragic day that befell them.
And so it was on this tenth of November, when Neville sat by himself and released a year’s worth of bridled tears, that an unexpected visitor befell his company. At first he thought the footsteps he heard were just his imagination, or imagined that the soothing song he heard was the manifestation of his mother’s voice, but he soon found”as he well knew”that neither of these were the case.
Through puffy eyes with blurry vision, Neville could just barely make out the dark outline of a girl with long blond hair that swayed as she went. Instinctively Neville scrunched himself as far into the corner he could get and did his best to keep from sniffling. The last thing he wanted was a girl around to embarrass him and disturb his solitary mourning.
But the noise of his shuffling and his efforts to breathe regularly were precisely what caught Luna Lovegood’s attention. She turned on her heel quickly so that her hair flew into her face and swung her arms as she made her way in the direction of the sound. Neville had half a mind to just up and run, but something in him told him to stay. Maybe he was relying on her seemingly detached sense of reality to guide her on past him, or maybe he thought having some company wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Luna knew exactly where Neville sat in the dark but fooled him into thinking otherwise as she walked right past him. Neville couldn’t help but be slightly disappointed. But then, just as the footsteps he heard grew fainter, they suddenly turned and became louder again. Luna was coming back down the corridor, passing Neville yet again, but this time she stopped short of her previous wandering. Again, she turned with a swish of her hair and walked back towards Neville.
This time she stopped right in front of him and kneeled on the stone floor. She couldn’t see anything of Neville’s figure in the shadow, but she didn’t have to. “Hogwarts is a great place…” she said dreamily.
Neville at once furrowed his brow, for he had no idea why she would say such a thing at a time like this. Her random comment had nothing to do with anything.
“...to find dark hiding spots to keep everyone from bothering you,” Luna finished.
Now it made sense to Neville, and she was absolutely right. A castle this big affords ample hiding places.
“Am I bothering you?” she asked.
Neville shook his head and answered with a shaky, “No.”
“I hope you don’t mind if I sit,” Luna said politely while making herself more comfortable on the very uncomfortable floor. “I like to be alone sometimes, too. But sometimes it’s more fun to be alone with someone than to be alone by yourself.”
As strange as that sounded, Neville had to agree this time. He had been alone by himself for the entire day since daybreak and it had to be late afternoon by now, judging by the angle of the sun that came in through a single high window. Normally if Neville had a chance to be completely alone on November tenth he took it, but somehow spendig part of it with Luna didn’t seem so bad.
“I like to be alone by myself when I think about my mum,” she continued. “I also like to be alone with my dad when I think about her, too. Wanting to be alone is pretty complex.”
Neville nodded, which she couldn’t see, and sniffed again. “Yeah,” he answered. “I like to be alone on November tenth. Usually I want to be alone by myself, but right now it’s not so bad being alone with you.”
“November tenth…” Luna sighed as she looked dreamily up at the ceiling.
“I sometimes wish the world could just skip straight from the ninth to the eleventh,” Neville chanced to say with his quaivering voice. He even attempted a nasally laugh along with it.
“Oh, but if November tenth was skipped every year, then you wouldn’t get to be alone by yourself…or alone with me today. You wouldn’t get to be alone to think about whatever it is you think about when you’re alone,” Luna told him with true concern in her voice. “November tenth is very important.”
“My parents,” Neville replied. “It’s the day when…” His voice cracked at this point and his lip quivered uncontrollably from trying to stifle another stream of tears. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to vocalize what he was thinking and didn’t feel like explaining the awful details to someone who couldn’t possibly understand what he was going through.
Luna took his silence as a cue. She knew how hard it was to lose a parent and how difficult it could be to talk about it, in any form or fashion. But Luna, unlike Neville, had allowed herself more than just one day out of the year to mourn for her mother, and having the additional support from her father, she was much farther along the road to recovery.
“It does get easier,” she assured him. “You’ll always miss them, of course. I know because I’ll always miss my mum, but then times goes on and you start to realize there are better ways of dealing.”
“Are you telling me just to forget about them?” Neville asked defensively. “I’m not just going to forget about my parents to make it easier or”“
“Oh, silly, no. That’s not what I meant at all. Quite the opposite, actually. See, November tenth is a hard day for you. You know why?”
Neville thought this an absolutely ridiculous and inconsiderate question. Did he really have to go into it again?
“Yeah, because it’s the day when my parents”“
“No,” Luna interrupted. “It’s the hardest day for you because it’s the only day of the year you allow yourself to really think about your parents. It’s not that it’s a particularly important day or that it’s the anniversary of some horrible event; it’s that you’ve waited all year long and held everything in, so that on this day you just can’t handle it anymore. November tenth is the opening of flood gates which you try so diligently every other day of the year to hold back.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Luna inched herself closer to Neville so that she too was enveloped in the shadows. “This cycle is killing you, Neville. All that time of holding it in is really taking its toll. If you only allow yourself one day a year, your grieving process will last three lifetimes, and we all know that the Sorceror’s Stone is gone so there’s no way you’ll be able to live three lifetimes. Although, a recent reporter for The Quibbler claimed to have found the missing ingredient to his experimental Fountain of Youth potion…” she trailed off. “Anyway, the point is I’m not telling you to forget about your parents, but exactly the opposite. The more you think about them and remember them on the other three hundred some-odd days of the year, the easier November tenth will be and the faster your wounds will heal.”
Neville took a deep and thought about what Luna was saying. It all seemed to make sense. Well, except for the Fountain of Youth potion part, but everything else seemed to be well thought out and logical.
“I don’t know if I can…” he said with heavy doubt in his voice.
Then Luna stood in a fluid motion. “Of course you can. It might take some time and practice, but if you really try hard you can do anything you want to do.” She turned on her heel and did a quick spin before taking a few steps down the corridor.
“But what if”“ Neville called after her.
She smiled. “I’ll see you here next November tenth, Neville.” And with that the blond girl proceeded down the hall and turned the corner, out of sight.
A couple of hours later, Neville left his hiding spot and performed a de-reddening charm for his eyes before joining the rest of the students in the Great Hall for dinner. November tenth was nearing its end, and normally Neville would be relieved at the prospect that it would be a whole year before having to endure such pain again, but seeing Luna at the Ravenclaw table made him think again. Maybe he would take her advice after all.
Fin.