Dear Diggory

chapter 15

That week was one of the worst I'd had in a long time.

It wasn't just about the ribbon anymore. That was merely the spark that triggered the entire explosion.

It was about everything. It was about my father who I rarely saw. It was about my mother who was dead and I would never see again. It was about Draco and his abusive father. It was about feeling helpless to the world. Feeling useless to doing anything worthwhile.

I had never been able to handle that concept, the idea that things were out of my control. I'd always felt that I needed to be of use to people, that everything had a solution if you just worked hard enough for it. The urge to match up to my own expectations had completely backfired on my emotions, rebounding against me like an elastic band against your skin. Stinging. Harsh. Punishing. 

The familiar darkness of my depression had swallowed me whole.

I'd been doing okay the last few months, managing the condition alongside my life, but the waves of pain were drowning me again. I felt like a rag-doll thrown against the jagged rocks of a cliff. I was exhausted, so exhausted with life.

It had all begun when I was 11. My mother died and things never felt the same after that. I'd been to a few therapists and I suppose that you could say I worked through the worst of it, but it never really went away. It wasn't like a broken leg that eventually healed.

It just hung over me instead, like a cloud I couldn't outrun.

Most of the time I pushed myself to function normally, I was even happy at times, but this week it was unavoidable.

I referred to them as my 'blackout periods' because I could rarely recall who I was normally. It was like Lila got wiped away and some other version of me was left. I felt like a shell of myself, I was convinced that if I looked in the mirror I would have been fading away like a ghost.

Instead of co-operating in real life, I laid in bed all day every day. After all, the weight on my chest felt too heavy to lift so I just didn't see the point in trying.

The girls continued the week as normal. For the first few days they were concerned about my change in behaviour, but I convinced them that I was just sick.

It wasn't a total lie, just not the type of sick that they were thinking. On the Wednesday I even placed some charms on my face and voice so I would appear to be ill. Evelyn informed my teachers and collected my classwork. Each day she added it to the pile next to my bed and I watched as it grew and grew.

I knew that the real Lila would have cared desperately about missing class, but I couldn't bring myself to. I just laid there, waiting and waiting and waiting for the darkness to go away.

Most of the time I slept and I was thankful because it meant I didn't have to talk much.

The truth was that I didn't want to talk to anyone, about anything. Nothing they could say would help, it was my own battle to endure.

I knew what my therapist would have said about my isolating behaviour, they would insist that I couldn't bare it alone, that talking to people would help. But I'd never really believed in that philosophy, to me it felt like sharing the problem, burdening others, only made it worse. Guilt would eat at me then and I wasn't prepared to deal with that emotion on top of everything else.

Thursday was the worst day of all. I made the mistake of thinking about my mother and what had happened to her. I wasn't really sure why, I knew it wouldn't lead to anything good. But I supposed we did that sometimes, purposefully engaging in behaviour that we knew wasn't good for us. Like some sick self-punishment, as if torturing myself would protect me from what others might do.

It was stupid, really stupid. But I did it anyway.

And so I sat up in bed abruptly as the panic attack began to hit me. My chest constricted tightly, my lungs felt like little matchboxes full to capacity. I gasped for air, drawing in sharp breaths. This carried on for a few minutes and I began to feel my fingers tighten. I tried to flex them but failed and the room felt like it was closing in on me. I rocked back and forth slowly, trying to control my breathing into a rhythm.

Eventually it passed, but I was drenched in sweat afterwards. A gross addition to my body that hadn't been washed in days.

I was completely ashamed, embarrassed about my inability to function normally like other people. It just wasn't that easy for me.

That night I waited until I was certain everyone was asleep before I let myself cry. I uttered a silencing charm to hide the sobs and clamped my hand over my mouth as an extra precaution. Hours later I fell asleep into my soaked pillow, not caring about the freezing sensation.

And when I woke up on Friday, things were the same.

So I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.

I waited for the real Lila to come back to me.