Hey there I go back to school in a few days and I'm really really nervous and terrified. I have bad anxiety so forgive me for staying anon but I was hoping you could write something like just a short fic if u wanted to...your writing has really helped to calm me down and make me feel better since I found your blog in February. It's fine if you don't want to but it'd just be so cool if you did!
Some days Lily feelslike sheâs sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool.
And the planet is full of clouded water, like her life ishappening in slow motion. She can see and hear people talking but isnât reallypaying attention. The water is so heavy, and all she is suspended where nothinggrows.
Because people are dying, and school, and homework, and herrobes are too short, and Petunia and peopleare dying. Her entire life seems full of things that are too big for her,sheâs wearing all of these layers of clothing and just sitting at the bottom ofa swimming pool. Absentmindedly drowning.
When sheâs lying in bed staring at the ceiling she thinks ofthat day when she was seven and Petunia was nine. They were jumping in thesprinkler in swimming togs that had frills running down the side, the ones thatlittle girls wore when they were too young to realise that this was their life.Lily remembers screaming as she ran through the spray and that the day was sohot the house melted into the green grass. Petunia was eating a chunk ofcrimson watermelon bigger than her head and she never ate the seeds back then,so she spat them into her hand and threw them at her. Lily sees herselfscreaming that delicious scream where your body cannot contain your happinessas her sister threw watermelon seeds at her, mouth dripping red onto her bonyknees as she grinned.
She wonders if Petunia still wonât eat the seeds inwatermelon. She always said it was because she was afraid a tree would grow inher stomach and straight out of her mouth, branches weaving in through herteeth. Lily realises she doesnât even know if Petunia still refuses to eat theseeds, doesnât know if the juice still drips down her mouth like liquidcandyfloss. Lily doesnât even know if Petunia still eats watermelon. Shit. Herhead hurts. She canât think about things like this because she feels soimpossibly sad that her heart will explode. She cannot take this horriblesadness.
So sometimes she stays in bed, doesnât go to school or classor anything for a while. And itâs those days when she wants to rip the blueveins out of her arms and throw them in a tangle straight at the people whocall her blood dirty. take them shewants to say, I donât want them anyway.They can have her blood, her bones, her heart, her everything. She is so tiredand so sad. She bites her knuckles just to have something to focus on.
Then there is her girls. Her blazing, glorious girls who areflares in her water logged head.
Mary, who paints her toenails and brings empty notebooks.They make lists and draw shitty doodles, Mary draws flowers and Lily drawsskylines. She bites the end of her pencil and Mary leans her head on hershoulder until they both fall asleep. Marlene is a burning building who talksin sharp, clean swearwords. She talks to Lily about everything that hurts untilLily is drained and limp on the bed, a wrung out wash cloth. Then Marlene liesnext to her and Lily listens to her breathing, head on her stomach. Â Evangeline jumbles their legs together andtalks about her five sisters at home and the beach tree they all climbed whenthey were little. Lily cries into her chest until she is drained of all liquidand Evangeline merely changes her shirt and brings dinner up that they both eaton Lilyâs bed.
Then there are the boys, who somehow manage to get into thegirls common room every night without fail because they are hers.
Peter plays card games with her, him cross-legged on the endof the bed while she leans against a mountain of pillows, schooling him in gofish. She has a sneaking suspicion that he lets her win, because surely no onecan be that bad at Uno. She doesnâtcare though, she adores him for trying to make her happy in any way he can.Remus goes over the dayâs notes and then the jumble of spells and Latin makessense in Lilyâs head. Remus takes chaos and rearranges it with words, she tellshim this and he bites his lip and smiles. Lily falls in love with him a bit,then. Sirius is the loudest thing on this planet, bouncing on her bed and goinginto long winding stories that always involve him rescuing someone from adragon at the end. But sometimes heâs very quiet, and Lily gets the sense he isaching to. He brings her a pile of daises one day and doesnât say anythingbecause he doesnât have to. Marlene has already filled her in with whathappened at lunch, with Regulus and the swearing and the words tattooed on theinside of Siriusâs brain. Lily takes the daisies and makes them both flowercrowns that she drapes over their heads. He looks at her and does a small grin,then kisses her on the cheek. She smiles back and is filled with so much loveher heart can almost breathe.
James is a tangle of James.He is tall and his feet dangle off the end of her bed, she tries to plait hishair when heâs got his head on her chest. At the end of every day he boundsinto her room and leaps onto her bed, telling her about the whole day and allshe might have missed. He taps rhythms on her collarbones. She tells him thatshe is so afraid of what is going to happen and he says I know, so am I. withoutany bullshit. Lily can always count on James for the truth, when she needs tobrush her teeth or stop thinking about things she canât help. He keeps herrooted to the ground and sometimes when she laughs and catches him looking ather. He looks at her like she is a galaxy instead of a girl, and she wonders ifanybody in the world has ever felt like this when he looks at her like that.Like she can do anything. She hasnât kissed him yet but, God, she wants to. Shereally, really wants to.
This is how it gets better. When Lily reads the paper asMarlene sits next to her talking about the muggle economy like a nerd. Aftershe has a shower and sheâs clean in freshly washed sheets. Sitting in bedreading a book when itâs quiet. Eating candy floss with Evangeline. Plaitingher hair. Swallowing tablets in one go. T-shirts that look good. HoneycombEvery-flavour beans. Clean looking notes sheâs spent all morning writing. Remusand Peter losing in strip poker. Laughing so hard she gets a stomach ache.Looking out a high window. A good test mark. Mary lending her mascara in themorning. Sucking on lollipops. Siriusâs laugh. Jamesâs everything.
Lily finds that itâs not the big things that pulls you out,but the little things. Small things that give her shots of joy to her veins, peoplecannot be saved by one person alone, they are saved by a group and good foodand things that make them laugh and the possibility of sun. Above all peopleare saved by themselves.
It never goes way, because people are dying and she is goingto be one of them, although she doesnât know it yet. But she has her girls, andshe has her boys and then she has James. Then Harry. She has people she lovesand would die for, she has little things that make her happy and big things.Lily reminds herself that if youâre sitting in the bottom of a swimming pool,itâs always comforting to remember that one day youâre going to push off andbreak the surface, becoming the light.
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