#not 1d

But here you are, and you’ve made it. Won the lottery, rolled the dice, been dealt the right hand. You’ve survived, and you’re supposed to feel grateful. Exhilarated. Ready for a second chance, another act.

You’re definitely not supposed to wake up most mornings and just try to… avoid the day. You’re not suicidal, no, that would be honestly kind of selfish. The people who didn’t make it would do just about anything for this chance, wouldn’t they? So it would be unsporting, really, to actively throw it all away. And, to be frank, you just don’t really have the energy to actually kill yourself.

So, instead, you sleep through breakfast because that’s one less task to finish for the day, and besides, your strong, beautiful body is wrecked and you’d really rather it not exist, and this is the next best thing. And you find a job that’s fine, it pays the bills on your shitty little cottage, you can do it from home, your supervisor doesn’t notice that you get very little done a few days of the month. You know what it feels like to care about your work with your entire soul, and you know what it feels like to lose that. This way is better.

You’ve got a few friends – acquaintances, really – and you go round to the pub with them once a month or so. Your mum writes every once in a while, and you write back, because you’ve really no wish to hurt anyone, least of all her. You don’t even want to hurt yourself; you just want to stop hurting, which would require you to stop existing, and since you can’t do that, you don’t do much of anything. You see her in Wales at Christmas. It’s fine. She’d be heartbroken if you were gone, which is reason enough to be here. Your father’s been dead since you were a child.

It’s not all unrelenting tragedy, of course. Life has a way of poking around the corners when you least expect it. The brilliance of a summer day; the way the leaves smell in autumn; the safety of reading in your flat as snow makes Yorkshire clean again; even the heady rush of spring, which makes you think, for a moment, that there might be something out there for you again.

The most flattening thing about losing everything is the way it disconnects you from the future. You dreamed, once upon a time. As strange and different as you were, you found a way to believe that the future held something for you. Now it’s all in the past.

You get the paper, still, Muggle and Prophet, but mostly to figure out how to stay out of the way when you’re a wolf. Not that you’re particularly dangerous, anymore; it turns out that a depressed man is a depressed wolf, and every month you chain yourself to a tree with awful silver handcuffs and wake up bleeding and hungry and tired.

Transformations were different when you were younger, you think – something about the wild passion of adolescence carried over into full moon nights. Maybe you were just so full of hormones that you couldn’t help but lose your mind. You remember running for miles and miles each night, with stag and rat and dog (don’t think about the dog) by your side, feeling free and whole and strong in the light. Now, really, you’d rather just lay down, hope you don’t bite yourself too much, and wait for it to be over. Even the other wolves ignore you; it’s pretty clear to everyone that you’re just not much use. You read in the paper that they’ve developed a treatment, but the price is beyond you. It doesn’t matter too much.

You keep your wand, because it’s the easiest way to clean up around the house, but other than scanning the Prophet headlines you’ve fallen out of touch with the wizard world. Your mum’s a Muggle; so are your bar friends. You’ve read, in the paper, that they’ve pushed through stricter anti-wolf laws since the War. It makes sense, of course; they’ve won, and they want to punish everyone who lost. But it makes it pointless to try for a wizard job. You edit Muggle papers for Muggle money.

You write to Dumbledore, just once, after the war. You think he might answer you, now that he knows it wasn’t you spying for the other side. He writes back, explaining kindly but firmly that the baby is safe with Lily’s family. You know a brush-off when you see one. And what claim do you have, really? You aren’t the baby’s godfather. You loved his parents, sure, but they loved other people more than you. You don’t really remember anything about her family – were they even at the wedding? – but clearly it’s for the best. You were good with kids once, of course, but there’s a world of difference between tutoring the first-years for work-study money and raising a child. You don’t reach out to the Wizarding world after that.

It turns out you like Muggle literature quite a bit. You start reading it for your editing job and find that there’s more to Muggles than they told you at Hogwarts. Dickens, Jane Austen, Tennyson, Mary Shelley; you don’t mind living in someone else’s gothic world for a few days at a time.

You try not to think about your own gothic prison, Azkaban, that cold, dark rock in the cold, dark sea, full of people imprisoned inside their heads. You know that whatever you’re feeling, he’s feeling much, much worse. You know he deserves it. Most of the time, you’re glad he didn’t ask you to join him. You don't want to know what you would have said. In time, deep fury and bottomless grief sink to the bottom of your self and are replaced by numbness. They become the planks on which you build your life.

You read Paradise Lost once for a cite-checking job and it leaves you catatonic for days. Would you have followed him to the end of the earth? Would you have turned your back on paradise and goodness for him? He never gave you that chance. You stay away from epics, after that. Heroics and world-historical loves are for teenagers.

Not that you don’t get laid. As the eighties wear on, it gets easier and easier to meet men out. You’re not the hottest man in the bar, and you know you’ll never feel actually beautiful again, but that’s really not the standard. You’re not looking for someone to love you. That part of your life is over. And really, men aren’t that complicated.

Twelve years slide past you this way, before you’ve hardly noticed. It’s amazing, really, how much feeling you could fit into a single day when you were eighteen, how much action – and how quickly the days flow along now. You’re thirty… not really that old, all things considered… but forty and fifty and sixty all look about the same.