If We Can Turn Back Time

Chapter 12: Season

I wait by Hagrid's hut until sunset. My hands are red and cold from the freezing temperature dropping along with the sun. The bright ball of light drifts down below the frozen lake and I wonder how warm its water would be if it swallows the sun whole. I would love to be the lake so I can swallow the sun. I want to be warm inside for once. 

Before I can breathe hot air into my cupped hands, I feel a shiver down my back. As if a strange creature with icicles for fingers are running its finger down my bare spine. I shudder and gasp. I look upwards, I find a dementor, an actual dementor floating gracefully along the silver linings of the clouds. I stand up and my hands reach in my cloak pockets, trying to get its fingers on my wand. I grasp its handle and pull the slightly yielding wand. The dementor's black cloak is beautifully wrapped around its barely visible neck and limbs, sunken to its bone marrows. I consider dementors as beautiful guardians. They gargle and groan and drift over to me with its long fingers, and before they can kiss me, I whisper.

"Expecto patronum." 

A small, lonely robin flies out in a wispy mass of  a white and silver trail. But it doesn't get to the dementor in time. It flies back to me and explodes in small bits of stardust. 

I can feel my face losing color. My entire body turns rigid as I gasp and feel the dementor approach me. Tears well in my eyes and I feel the lump in my throat and my eyelids burning. If I'm going to die, its because I failed to think of the happiest moment in my life. Because my life is so filled with losses and goodbyes. 

When I was born, I knew something was wrong when I woke up with my mother and father screaming at each other, their screeches penetrating the silence. I knew I had to protect myself at all costs. I shut my door because I was afraid my dad would come in and scream at me in monologues about how I am a failure and everything would have been better without me because everything is my fault and then once I remember that my dad would tear down at mom because she talked back and then he came in and he slapped me across the face although that was only once he would scream at me until I felt like heat was burning through my face and I could explode into a million pieces and before he left he opened my door and he screamed at me and he pushed me down and while I was on the ground he knocked all of the books off my bookshelf and he broke my computer and I was writing my stories there and I forgot to save them and he threw a vase at the closet and it broke and the glass hit me and I still have the scars and every time I close my eyes I can see the glass breaking and how he screamed at me and how he slapped me across the face and my mom just standing there and talking about how her life is miserable and telling me that I have nothing to do with it but I have everything to do with it. I lost my mom eventually. She didn't die, but she disappeared. I got my Hogwarts letter right after that. A letter to freedom. My way of escapism. 

And the scary part is that that was just some days and often times he was just there. On the couch, sipping cold ice tea and watching the news that he did not care about. And living with him was like walking through a minefield-one wrong step and a fatal explosion bound to kill you. I lived my  life in this spiral of memories and I never got to be properly happy and a dementor is going to kill me because I wasn't happy. This was pathetic and so I couldn't help but cry. 

But when I wipe my eyes, my vision is all too clear. Too clear to see a dementor floating down to the ground with its entire body bending and turning into a frail old man with a raggedy cloak draped around its limp body hastily. 

There was no patronus involved. The dementor just died. It just died on its own. With tears still streaming down my face, I begin my run towards Hogwarts. To the headmaster's office to tell McGonagall. 

Shit my tears are already freezing on my face.