coin operated girl

I like to press my face against window glass. It's a difficult endeavour due to the contours of my face, but it has all the coolness of water and a pleasant solidity without the stinging bite of ice. Fevered dreams are soothed by the night this way, dissipated gently by the moon and the chill. I sometimes wonder if sleeping out amongst the stars would only make this clarifying force more powerful. If there is something to be said for what coalesced condensate might lend.

Spring is very nearly upon us and the whole world is alive with pheromones. They waft through the corridors like smoke. Thick and cloying and rising to fill every high place. And ever SMALL space with their pressed bodies and locked mouths and failed attempts at sly escape.

Really failed.

It is sometimes very difficult to look in the mirror and see where my youthful cheeks and wildly disparate teeth once lived. I can't rearrange my features in any manner that makes my childhood come into focus. I am a woman, despite whatever deluded fantasies I may have otherwise.

I would like to be an Amazon. I have the height for it. I could comfortably exist without a right breast in favour of strength. I would be malformed and maybe I wouldn't have been so enticing.

Then again - supernumerary digits weren't balked at.

Cold, red maws splayed across my skin in unaccounted remorse. Poetic, isn't it?

And so we begin again. The smell of the air is spring and death. Antithetical really.

In another life I was a green grove of aspens. I was a sly multitude, my roots buried deep beneath the ground to give a false impression that I was many, instead of one. There is power and safety in numbers and jovially I bluffed my impressive value, both to those that would prey upon me and to myself.

Momentum drives me more than any force in nature. To fuel my future by the turn of a past-spindle; there is no uphill, only down. A side gets nicked, a new direction is made. Turning and turning and velocity is remarkable if only because you can't feel any of it. I feel as if I should and so I am here. Lying on the quidditch field. Trying to feel the world turning.

That is a song too. It's funny how you can hold a million lyrics in your head and no Transfiguration. Maybe I'm wrong but who is to say what's right? I need somebody to help me through the night. World turning; I've got to get my feet back on the ground. World turning; everybody's got me down. No piano though.

A free bird leaps on the back of the wind
and floats downstream till the current ends
and dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage
can seldom see through his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.

This is a poem by a Muggle American by the name of Maya Angelou. Susan gave this to me in session once and when she first did I was very cross at her because I read the final lines in the 3rd and 6th stanza and thought she was trying to Make A Point. The last two lines. His tune is heard on a distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. I don't like the idea of being inspirational. I don't like the idea that that is a good thing. That standing on a grave of dreams, my shadow shouting on a nightmare scream is beneficial to whoever is sitting on that distant hill.

But it was an easy poem to get stuck in my head. It has a very easy cadence that slips through the gap spaces between your bones and your eyes and your teeth. It can turn a leaden tongue into candy floss.

It's the difference between being open and closed. That's what it is. That even when you are closed, and locked up in your own fear and anger, and restrained, every word out of your mouth speaks for something more. Towards something more. Dipping wings into orange sun rays and skimming a dawn-bright lawn. Every word knocks on the door and has the strength to be heard at a distance and waits, waits to be open.

So I can see why she gave it to me.

Seamus said I should write poetry and I don't know how because I think you need to be in that open position to do it. Also, I don't have the patience to pick my words like that. I am not a perfectionist and I would rather just talk. Or write. And not think about how I'm sounding even if I probably should. But maybe that is the point, that I don't think about it and the sound of my words are a tune on a distant hill for now.

I hate school. I hate classes. I hate homework. I hate the blah blah blah unceasing humdrum tone of educators stuck in a temporal loop, repeating the same words, repeating the same pictures on the chalkboard, repeating the same life, over and over and over and over and over again until they are indistinguishable from the cobbles they pace. The walls are gray, the sky through the window is gray, the ground is gray and the teachers are gray.

I hate my life and I just want to cry and punch every man I see in the face so they bleed and cry too. Shed your tears - that is what they are for.

I don't expect you to understand this war.

Bleed and cry and pour every ounce of yourself out into a pillow or a bath or a pound of chocolate and just wait for it all to fill up again and this is what you are supposed to want, over and over and over and over and over again until it doesn't feel pointless or impossible or a stabbing death.

Breathe in, breathe out. Exhale and inhale.

Everything gets easy with repetition.

I was right. The tea was very nostalgic. I drank it on a windowsill and watched the world from behind the glass. The story of my life, I think.

I'm wearing a blanket. I like it because you can bunch it up around your cheeks and chest and knees and feel like a package. Dressing gowns may provide a more even distribution of warmth, but they are clinical, almost. Blankets, more often than not, have history.

To be brave and venture around the castle would be a step in the right direction. I am a Gryffindor, after all. I am, in fact, brave.

It's strange to be here again.

I missed the pillows. I missed feather pillows more specifically, which includes the ones here at Hogwarts. I presume that I will drink tea in the morning and that will also be astoundingly nostalgic as well. This whole place is like a dream and even if it's not necessarily a good one, it is one that I don't have to fear.

I don't miss homework. I'll dread that until the end of my days here. Timetables. Outlines. Bah.

The castle feels different and I have to say that I thought it might be Dumbledore to come and get me. It didn't matter that he was dead; I remembered that he was dead. I still felt disappointed. This castle feels different and it's because he isn't in it.

The sun will rise tomorrow and another day will pass and my life has changed very completely since the previous morning. It doesn't feel real, but it will when I am in a tie and trying to do something futile to my hair. Maybe.

I am really enjoying this pillow. Sink into eternity, squish it up, re-sink.

( I walk the line, tripping each time, and I stumble / But now that I'm half gone / The world's on the table, I'm willing and able / This beautiful storm, it comes with no warning at all )