Depression
It was bemusing how photographs could so clearly capture the essence of their subject, when they were nothing more than ink upon parchment, dosed liberally with potion.
I turned the ornate silver frame over in my hands as I pondered the subject. Could it be that upon snapping such a picture you capture a small piece of that person’s soul? What else could make inked subjects so painfully and flawlessly resemble their living counterparts?
I turned the subject around for a few more minutes in my mind, before dismissing the idea. Soul stealing, even in minute measures, was still dark magic, after all. Although the average witch or wizard may never roster enough interest in academic magic to contemplate such a fact, there would always be one such as myself to which the idea would inspire reflection. Such a practice could never be sustained if it was discovered and laid open to public slander; ergo, it must not exist.
A subtler, gentler magic must be at work within this image. Maybe, I continue to muse, as another avenue of thought strikes, the enchantment actually comes from within me. My perceptions of how these pictures should act imprint themselves upon the ink, while it is from my memories of those dear to me that their two-dimensional depictions learn how to smile with just the right amount of wickedness, how to laugh with the right amount of merriment, or how, most painful of all, to entice my battered heart with the emotion written boldly in glistening eyes.
It matters not, I suppose, how the enchantment is wrought. The intellectual distraction had been welcome, however; anything would have been had it kept thoughts of family from plaguing my mind.
They were all there, of course, standing immortal within an ornately carved frame. Well, I assumed they were all present – Ron was, in point of fact, nowhere to be seen, but I took that to mean he had stumped out of the picture in a pique of anger and resentment. He had, after all, been standing next to George waving merrily at me three years before, when this same picture had decorated my night stand at Hogwarts.
I slumped in my seat, and leaned my head wearily against the back of my armchair, unwilling to look upon my mother’s tear-stained face or my father’s disappointed frown any longer. My siblings were in varying states of disarray, but all managed to convey their fury towards me – though none quite so effectively as Ron.
Bill contented himself with glaring stolidly at me, his long, lean frame taught with tension, while Fred and George would intersperse rude gestures with fits of flurried whispering... I assumed they were hatching a plan of retribution against me, but was not unduly concerned. I had, after all, probably suffered worse from them in the past.
Charlie was perhaps the least antagonistic, although he had always been the most relaxed of my siblings, and consequently, my favourite brother. It pained me to think that he was probably the only one who could stand me when we were growing up – he was certainly the only one who ever bothered to listen to my stories or sympathise with my problems, even the ones that had rather laboriously centred upon long forgotten Ministry decrees. Now, he lounged nonchalantly against a wall and refused to meet my gaze, though he was clearly unhappy with the tension of the family he was encased with.
Lastly, Ginny, my little sister, sat resolutely cross-legged at the bottom of the frame with her back towards me. I couldn’t see her face, but the set of her shoulders and the furious way she repeatedly swiped a fly-away piece of hair behind her ear left me in no doubt of her feelings.
Sadly, I placed the frame face down upon the tabletop. It would do me no good to dwell on it any further tonight.
However, with nothing now to occupy my wearied thoughts the silence was oppressive. My only auditory companions were the quiet, enduring tick tock of the hall clock, and the occasional drip of a leaky tap.
This, then, was all I had to show for my life. At the end of all the gruelling hours spent studying and striving for academic success, after all the tedious, repetitive tasks I had waded through to climb the Ministerial ladder, and after all the social opportunities I had wasted in an effort to denote yet more hours to my job in the vain hope that my true potential would at last be spotted, this is all my life amounts to. A finely furnished, but crucially, empty, house. I wouldn’t even go so far as to call it a home – some days I barely recognised it as more than a four-walled structure I use to sleep in when my office chair has given me too much back pain to contemplate employing for the fourth night in a row.
I sighed at the bleakness of my thoughts, and in vain tried to summon up a cheerier contemplation.
Tick tock... tick tock... tick tock...
The monotony was crucifying me.
I stretched, wincing as a joint popped in my knee, and limbered myself up. Wandering over to the window I stopped briefly to re-arrange a tendril of tinsel that was hanging precariously from a forlorn branch of my beleaguered Christmas tree. I had found this tree quite by accident, but after spotting it had found myself quite unable to resist buying it.
Originally, I hadn’t intended to obtain a tree at all. There was little point really – I didn’t expect any gifts to lay beneath it, and its presence in my sitting room would serve only as a reminder of how alone I was at a time of year when everybody should have someone beside them. I had been returning from work last week, however, when I happened to pass by a Muggle tree shop. There had been a sign outside declaring a half price sale on the few remaining trees, and amongst the busy splendour of the others had sat my tree.
It was a bedraggled stick of a thing; its branches stuck out at odd angles and those that were still covered with needles were sparsely so. It had a crooked lean to it which gave it the continual appearance of being in danger of toppling over at any moment, and was at least a foot smaller than the very shortest of the others. The moment I saw it, however, I knew it was my tree, for it struck such a chord of empathy within me, and the thought crossed my mind that if we were both destined to be unloved and unwanted at Christmas, then we could at least be so together.
It now strikes me that I must really be more pathetic than I had been aware – to make my only companion a dying tree on this day, the eve of Christmas.
The soft sound of Muggle carollers drifts up to my window from the street below and all at once I am struck by a wave of longing for those cosy, comfortable Christmas’s at the burrow, surrounded by love and companionship in the bosom of a family. The pain, in fact, is so intense, so sharp, as it burrows its niggling way into my estranged heart that I turn in a wave of determination and toss my cloak around my shoulders.
The memories come to me unbidden; Fred and George’s raucous singing of those same carols sung below, and my mother’s scolding as they belted out the alternative, and rather unsavoury, joke verses. The kitchen table groaning under mountains of mother’s cooking, the ghoul in the attic decorated festively, (and rather unwillingly), with a Christmas hat, and holly wreaths strung haphazardly around the house – wreaths that Bill would have to periodically check for infestations of holly-harpy’s lest the cheeky Yule-time dwellers snag a Weasley victim.
Pain and loss emanated from within me in synchronicity to the bittersweet memories – every one like a knife’s thrust to my heart. In my desperation to assuage it I searched frantically for my boots, no thought or plan evident in my mind save the wish that I be with family. However, as I rounded the back of the armchair, thick dragon-hide boots clutched in one hand, that picture frame caught my eye again.
Something stilled within me. I cannot identify what, but I know that breathing was beyond me as I reached for the frame and gently, very gently, lifted it up to my face once more.
I don’t know what I hoped to find – acceptance perhaps, forgiveness and love shining out of the faces of my family as if they had sensed the change of heart I had just experienced. It seemed impossible to me that the ragged emotions raging within me were not perceptible to the people in that picture, that they did not both feel and understand my pain and forgive me the moment they comprehended my hurt.
Whatever I it was I had hoped to find, however, did not exist in reality. The picture was as unchanging in its arctic fury as it had been before, save for the appearance of Ron’s elbow on the right-hand side.
The boots fell from my fingers to thud dully against the carpet. Numbly, I slid back into my armchair my eyes never leaving those of my family. What had I been thinking? That merely returning home tonight would be enough to heal all the hurt inflicted? That they would accept me back willingly into a nest I had deserted in the harshest of manners? That I was deserving enough to have such a family surrounding me again after the mistakes of the past lay crumbling at my feet? Hardly.
A choked snort wrangled its way out of my throat at the idea that mere moments before I had been about to set off on a journey home. Raggedly I tore the cloak from my shoulders, and suddenly furious, screwed it into a ball and hurled it at the far wall. Then, exhausted by that mere effort, I slumped backwards and stamped my eyes shut against the harsh evidence of reality.
Blindly, I reached for the one source of comfort left open and inviting. Without even knowing which bottle my scrabbling fingers had found, I twisted the neck and downed the contents. Tonight, I did not even have need of a glass.
Somewhere within myself I felt that ugly creature of depression loom its gargantuan weight over me, and willingly, I fell into its gaping maw.