Lily gets home and writes a letter.
The first time she does this, she’s fifteen. It’s a love letter to some random boy that caught her eye in class, and she doesn’t know why exactly she writes a letter to him. Maybe he was just an excuse to get her inspiration out, or maybe she actually thought she could like him. She would never know.
After that, it became a regular thing. Too scared to tell someone how she felt? She wrote a letter. A fight with her friends? She wrote a letter. Slight inconvenience? She wrote a letter. That first letter was the only love letter she had written though.
She didn’t really tell people, because it was a her thing, a Lily thing. It was her way of getting out her emotions without screaming, getting mad or getting way too excited for something. She just sat down and wrote all of her emotions out of her body.
She liked exaggerating in that first one. Writing like the boy was her long lost soulmate, instead of just a random classmate she would probably turn out to find annoying.
But the sad ones were never exaggerated. She poured her heart out, which would often end with tears on the paper and spilled ink, sometimes even with the letter being torn apart and thrown away. Not because they were bad letters, but because she never wanted to be reminded of those moments again.
When she’d finally told someone, her sister nonetheless, she got laughed at. ‘Who writes letters these days anyway,’ Petunia had said, a mean smirk on her face, ‘that’s so weird. Imagine being that big of a nerd.’
Lily went back to her room, eyes tearing up, and she destroyed every nice letter she’d ever written about her sister. (She knew she would regret it later on, but she didn’t really care about that right then.) After that, she wrote another letter.
So, she didn’t stop. She kept writing letters, without telling anyone she did. Most of them got destroyed a few days or weeks later, but that wasn’t the point. The point was her getting her emotions out, and the letters helped her, so she kept writing them.
One year later, she finally had the courage again to tell someone. That someone being her two best friends, who didn’t laugh at her for it. Though she didn’t expect them too, otherwise she never would’ve told them.
So, she kept going, writing her letters. To Mary, Marlene, Remus and James. Even to Sirius once, but that one got ripped up pretty quickly. Some time later, Regulus also became a regular. They became fast friends after he and James started dating, which was both a blessing and a curse for her. He had it hard, often having moments of weakness where she would be the only one that found out, or where he would turn to her, because he knew he could trust her. She was happy that he knew, but sometimes she wished he didn’t. Sometimes carrying both hers and his feelings became too much. It didn’t stop her from writing though.
That same year, she finally wrote a love letter again. Her second ever love letter, but this time, it was actually about someone she loved, instead of a random classmate.
She sat down in an empty room, one candle lit to not attract too much attention, and she wrote it in one go.
My dear beloved,
This is the first letter I write to you after realizing, which is kind of scary. It feels weird, writing this thinking that I will keep feeling my feelings forever, while in reality this all might be a deception, of friendship in a cursed society, that could end tomorrow.
I noticed today I miss you a lot. I imagine this is how the shore feels when the tide turns at midnight on a full moon night, all lonely and cold. Left with a simple trace of you, knowing you’ll be back but still missing you in the meantime.
Whether I’m allowed to miss you is probably a whole deception of it’s own. Especially when I myself am not even certain of my own complicated feelings. Am I allowed to call it love if I’m not even sure if I ever experienced the grand feeling the poets write about and the world longs for?
Though I think I will never experience a love like in books, and with me most of the world. Me and society are too selfish for that.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be so complicated at all. Maybe, for a sixteen year old girl who just came out of the worst year of her life, this scrawny feeling is worthy being compared to the great, magnificent love everyone talks about. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether you are certain, whether you are still doubting which way your life is going. You may be allowed to doubt whether you are planning to live a life full of love, or a purposefully empty one. You could still be deciding whether you will spend your life trying to make the world a better place, or choose to be selfish, and rightfully so, until you are six feet under. Maybe you’re allowed to feel uncertain, as long as you feel.
Though I am certain of one ting. When I started my letter with ‘my dear beloved’, I meant that. You may have started doubting my words once I expressed my thoughts on love and my feelings, but this will always be a thing that is certain. The moon and the stars and my love for you.
Yours Truly
These love letters became a regular thing, just about every time Mary did something that made her feel all gooey inside. Just about every time she felt like she needed to get these emotions out, before she would explode and scream through the halls how much she loved her best friend, in a way that would make anyone know she definitely didn’t mean it platonically.
She got older, and the time or inspiration to write letters came less often. Her letters to Mary became a lot more rare after they actually got together, though she didn’t exactly let Mary know all of her feelings, scared that she would be too much or come over too strong.
Her letters to Regulus also started to become shorter, with more time between them. Not exactly because he was doing better, but because Lily was tired of expressing the same feelings in a different way each time.
She didn’t show anyone her letters, not yet anyway, though she did think about maybe one day showing her friends them. (The good ones only, of course, and only those that were addressed to them.)
And though the letters came less often, she still wrote. Every time she felt like she was about to explode again, she wrote. She wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, and it made her feel lighter, like the words carried the pain, the love, away.