You are five, watching your Aunt carefully lower a glossy sheet of oddly shifting power towards a rather roaring fire. You were supposed to be dusting the dining table, the third on your morning list of chores, but the innocence of not yet beaten out of existence youthful curiousity drew you incautiously closer to the living room fire, the flames combining with the July heat to make the room beyond bearable.

You watch the flames slowly lick at the blur of red and green and black until nothing is left but ash, oddly mesmerized. Your cousin’s shout rouses you at the same instant it causes your aunt to whip around abruptly from her own contemplation of the flames.

You barely have enough time to snatch one last glance at the fireplace because for an instant you could swear something moved. Then you can’t think about anything for a long time.

Much later, gloom invading the slats of light from your grate, concealing the red and purple and pain haze surrounding you, you let yourself wonder at the fact your aunt-who can detect a nosy neighbor’s surreptitious eye at 50 paces and is always, always right-neglected noticing you for so long. It is the first time you hear the work “freakishness” in your own thoughts, rather than from others.

As you drift painfully off even later, you take a moment to wonder why your aunt, in those moments between turning and screaming for Uncle Vernon because of course it was a weekend, of course, why your aunt reached up to brush something from the corner of her eye.

You are seventeen when you finally know the reason why.

You are thirty seven when your realize magic had very little to do with any of it at all.

L&S

You are eleven when a half-giant who is quite possibly the nicest person you’ve ever met says the names “James and Lily Potter.” You are eleven and it is the first time you have heard your mother’s name.

You are eleven the first time you know what your mother’s name was at all.

L&S

You are seventeen and in someone else’s head but not really because they’re dead and the headmaster who lied about so many, many things says her name. Says “Lily.” Just that, like it meant something. Like it meant everything. Like that was a surprise to him.

And that made you feel ashamed. Because it surprised you too.

You have heard her name many times over your scholastic career. At thirteen she was “your mother Lily.” Your eyes are always “your mother’s”, or even “your mother Lily’s.”

At sixteen you’ve heard that so many times you’re beyond sick of it.

Partly because that’s all anyone ever says.

You are seventeen and in a dead man’s mind and you suddenly realize you still only know your mother’s name.

L&S

You are still eleven when you sit in a dungeon trying your hardest to be good and quiet and unnoticeable, like you have all your life. It works as well as it ever did at the Dursley’s, and you are left with the concrete certainty that Uncle Vernon actually was right, all these years, because someone besides his vile dog loving sister just agreed with him in the judgement that everything that has ever happened to you was your own fault.

And that shouldn’t matter so much, because it’s different here, it’s different now, you’re a hero here, you matter here. You’ve repeated that so many times to yourself in the week since your world was turned upside down by a half-giant on a giant rock in the middle of a stormy sea, hoping that this time, this time it will be real. This time, it will be true.

Sitting there, trying your hardest not to cower, fear slithering back into the edges of your mind from dark corners, you feel your desperate mantra drift ever further away in the realization that just because magic is real, doesn’t make everything magically okay now.

L&S

You are seventeen watching yourself watch your headmaster condemn you like a lamb for thanksgiving dinner and being called upon it by a man you have spent almost half your life learning how to hate by learning how to hate him.

You are seventeen and you wonder, for the first time in your memory, just for a moment, if that means you might actually be worth something more than a lamb.

You are seventeen when you start to wonder if just perhaps, you might just be worth something at all, after all.

L&S

You are six and have just learned to read when you sneak into the school library at lunch and crack open the moldering and slightly soggy Webster dictionary perched precariously on a shelf just far enough above your head to be dangerous if you weren’t abnormally strong for your small stature-no mean feat when doing 8 hours of chores on if-you-were-lucky-literally-a-crust-of-mouldy-bread-a-day.

You carefully lift the tome down with slight difficulty and quietly kneel, years of ingrained slap-enforced conditioning preventing furniture ever looking like a good option to the floor, even when you are relatively likely to be completely undisturbed.

You flip carefully through the sticky, greying pages, careful not to tear any of the pages any further, mouthing the as yet unfamiliar letters as they slowly squelch past your small stick-like fingers.

You find the word easily enough, carefully sounding out each letter, even though, until two weeks ago, you knew it better than your own name, because it was the only name you’d ever known.

It is the second week of September in your first year of primary and you have just read your first complete word.

 F.R.E.A.K

L&S

You are fifteen and have just broken into your professor’s mind and then been summarily thrown out again, but not quickly enough.

The glass shattering around your head is somehow still less disturbing than the unpleasant realization that you have just slid into a chair without permission and isn’t that ironic, that your whale of an uncle is still more terrifying than anyone you’ve ever encountered-megalomaniac mass murderers notwithstanding.

Still, all that pales in the face of the haunting realization you are caught up in that in that memory, you had a heck of a lot more in common with your most hated professor than with your own godfather, let alone your father. Even more disturbing perhaps, you are actually not sure you’d want it to be the other way around at all.

As you flee out into the passageway, your decrepit trainers slapping against the hard, slick stones, the omnipresent smell of perpetual damp reminding you of nothing but your old primary school library at midday in September, you can’t help but wonder how old Snape was when he learned to use a dictionary.

L&S

You don’t hate your aunt. Petunia, that is. After you come of age, you make not further claim to the dog loving Marge.

Not that Petunia was ever any nicer to you; she spent your childhood figuring out ever more creative ways to attempt to maim you with kitchen utensils. Yet somehow, something about your aunt always stirs something inside your chest that has always been disturbingly dead in reference to Vernon and Dudley, ever since you were small. Why this is you never quite figure out, back then.

As a teenager, watching Mrs. Weasley squeeze the life near out of Ron after your latest close call with deadly arachnids, you chalk it all up to the wish for a tangible maternal figure.

Three years older and only slightly taller, you gaze at a picture of your mother laughing at something and you remember tears and flames and flashes of red and you think you finally know the answer.

L&S

You forget the black until you are seventeen, standing on the shores of the center of the black lake, gazing on an austere black headstone, tears of your own slowly dripping down onto the ground, mingling with the torrential rain lending rather a cinematic atmosphere to the vista.

And standing in that downpour trying your level best to catch your death of pneumonia, you finally remember that old photograph in its entirety. Remember there were two figures, not one, night and day but so happy in each other.

Maybe that memory is now overlaid with someone else’s, brighter and more clearly fixed in your mind’s eye, but it doesn’t change the truth of the matter. That moment, that picture, has always bound you and your aunt together, from that first moment all those years ago. The only two people left in the world, now, who knew what it was like, truly, to love Lily Evans.

Because, that is the moment by which you will always know what love is, what if looks and feels like. And you will always now be tied to your aunt, forever more, even if you never lay eyes on her again, which is more than likely these days, because you are now truly the only two people left in the world who loved Lily Evans. Just Lily Evans, not Lily Potter.

You stare down at the slick dark stone, so silent and quiet and somehow simultaneously spine chilling and awe-inspiringly impressive, much like the man buried beneath it.

One word, etched carefully in a glowing red, slowly forms across the face of the tomb.

L&S

Truthfully though, you will always hate your aunt more than a little, just as you will probably always hate your once most hated professor, although rather less that you do your aunt perhaps.

And yet, you will also always know that they, like you, loved your mother. That one undeniable, inexorable fact will always bind the three of you together, just as a photograph once bound them all together in your mind’s eye.

And that fact, no matter how long you live, will always make you love them as well, more than just a very little.

L&S

You never knew your mother. You never got the chance to. And no matter how hard you try, you can never really know her now, not really. All you can really know, in the end, with any true degree with certainty, is that she was loved.

You will always love them for that.

L&S

You are twenty five and holding your daughter for the first time. She yawns quietly and opens her eyes long enough for flashes of brown to shine up at you. You are enchanted.

Let’s call her Lily, you say. Just Lily.

You hold your daughter tenderly out to your wife, and you can’t help but think, she has her mother’s eyes.