Galgentanz
Galgentanz
Love. Oh, love, it was. A wonderful feeling, if reciprocated. If not, then love can be heartbreak, pain, destruction, and everything sad and grey. There is a reason there is so much media made about love – paintings, love songs, movies, books…
But was it love?
In my world, all these years, love seemed simple. I had seen it from my parents, my aunts and uncles, and their marriages. I had observed it in school, seen its fleeting existence in movies, and read about it in books. I had watched it bloom and fade. Although I had never experienced it myself, it was never something I felt strongly about. I was like a few others, who were watching it from the sidelines, at some point convinced it would never find me. Not the romantic sort, at least.
I had read about the complicated sort of romantic love. The one that follows heartbreak and a story so wild, I was sure, it would always just be a story someone came up with, although that always made me feel a little sad.
I was convinced, that I would one day find a good man and get married, even though, I was one of those who would have rather have a fulfilling life chasing after success, but I had always been made fun of about that wish, seeing as I was a girl. Watching my whole future, which I had dreamt up, disappear was never something I had seen coming. And all that it took was one moment in my last year at Hogwarts. One moment I often thought about, wishing I could change the past.
A woman’s ruin was often a man. Not a Mr. Darcy, nor a Rochester or a Heathcliff. No, it was a Riddle.
Tom Riddle, just a boy one moment, and in the blink of the eye a man so feared, it was almost – only almost – impressive if it weren’t so unbelievably terrifying for me.
It had been an unimportant moment for me. A tiny reveal of who I was, put into the world for the first time right in front of him. I usually acted out with friends, and people I liked and knew enough to know they would not drop me the moment I acted differently than how I was in class. It was easy to miss if someone wasn’t in my house. I was a Ravenclaw at heart – I liked thinking of many possibilities, coming up with ideas, sitting in the library with my housemates, and just reading and taking breaks in between to talk about whatever we had read and what impression that left us with. I liked drawing and writing – no writing essay had ever been a problem for me -, and I loved sharing my wisdom with people who in return loved coming to me for said wisdom. I liked sharing my wits and knowledge from books I had read. Some of it was a mixture of my own thoughts regarding the literature but it always worked out. People liked listening to me ramble, not as often as I would have loved it to happen, but enough for me to develop some kind of ego throughout the years. I had built up quite the courage and confidence to put in my knowledge and wisdom into daily situations. Never interrupting anyone and butting in with my opinion, more so in a way, that I had never been confident enough to let that side of me slip into a normal daily conversation if the person in front of me wasn’t a trusted friend. And on that day in October, merely a month after the new school year had started, I had surprised Tom Riddle with this side and with many more afterward.
It wasn’t anything special. He was taken by surprise, an unfortunate little moment from my side where I had been careless, which he fixated on out of sheer curiosity. Maybe, it was meant to be, is something I was trying to tell me, as grim as that sounded, otherwise my explanations did not make sense. Perhaps I had to put all my reasonings on the meant-to-be-card in order for things to make sense again. I did not want to slip into the fog that had been my mind ever since.
I had often read about moments like these in books. A star-crossed lover’s fate, a single moment that changed everything, a new chapter unfolding – but I had just never thought it possible. Something that day had shifted, whether Tom or I had wanted that, or not.
So, was this love?
It seemed much more sinister, much more intense.
It was obsession and pain. It was pride and injury. It was possessiveness and selfishness. It was the prey and its predator. It was a cat and a mouse. It was me and him in an endless game of hide and seek.
I had hidden from his eyes every chance I got. In the library, when I wanted to further brighten my horizon, where he was then looming. In the great hall, where I would feel carefree and happy talking to my friends, knowing nobody cared enough to watch me come undone and let my real self shine, where he was then watching my every move. In the class, when I was whispering funny insider jokes to my friends, where he was now eavesdropping, trying to get a look at me.
All this turned extreme quite fast.
In the library, if I had hidden away for a while, he would stop trying to find me, but then order one of his friends to stand guard. In the great hall, where he would get his whole group of friends to watch me as well, whisper every now and then, to make sure I knew they were talking about me. In class, where he would get his friends to snatch my friends away, whenever a professor talked about a partner assignment, ending with us being the only ones left with no partner.
He turned me into a recluse. He turned me into someone whose every move was watched so often that I would have trouble breathing when he or his lackeys were nearby.
His presence was omnipresent. It was swallowing me up and looming over me at the same time.
Even now, as I was sitting in this muggle home, far away from the wizarding world, I felt him somehow. Maybe I needed to stop thinking about him. It was easier to feel detached from him when I was banishing him from my active thoughts. But my consciousness was not this kind.
He slithered his way into my nightmares. More often than not, he was there.
His eyes, sharp in their gazes, were always there, watching me. Sometimes, I saw his figure in a dark corner of my home, thinking its him, and that he has, at last, found me, but it always turned out to be just that – a shadow of the past. I was often seeing his past self in faces I saw when going outside. It was mostly the memory of the moment from October, that day everything changed, that made it into all my hallucinations and dreams. The way he had looked up and seen me – really seen me. It was like he had taken a peek into my soul, and opened every carnage and every little bone to further investigate what made me who I am.
A single dark curl had come undone from his hair and fallen into his forehead as he was watching me, stripping me from my skin and bones and dissecting me like a frog, wanting to see my insides. It had been haunting.
The newspapers were all telling. The rumours were proof. The sensing of doom was confirmation. I was sure he was building something. Something big. Something he had started at Hogwarts already.
I had a few friends reporting back to me at first, updating me on his whereabouts, as I was sure, he did the same to know where I was and what I was doing. I was making sure to never include any details about me, though. My owls were sent inconsistently so he could not intercept them. But as his reputation grew grimmer, his crimes were getting louder and I was becoming more careful.
I stopped sending owls at some point. Though, the last letter I received was a warning more than a sweet goodbye from my dear friends.
Women my age were disappearing. Women who looked suspiciously a lot like me. Women with long brown hair and with dark eyes. They often shared a trait with me. Either they loved reading, loved expanding their knowledge, or they were in positions where they were able to voice their own concerns – strong women. Something I had let slip out of me in my last year at Hogwarts, in that one month, before falling into whatever trap Tom Riddle was. Something he had seen from me and diminished so fast, that I was never able to gain it back.
They were disappearing more frequently lately. Some were found dead; others had been tortured beyond recognition and a few had never been seen again.
It wasn’t hard to admit that I was living in a constant state of fear and anxiety.
I knew he was after me and the more he couldn’t find me, the more unhinged he became. It was a scary decline to see him in and I wasn’t sure I would meet the same fate as these girls did. Their only crime being they had something that reminded him of me enough to cut their lives short. He was a monster.
But he was my monster, should have been at least, if I wasn’t cowardly hiding away in the muggle world, watching from a safe distance.
I had to cut everyone out of my life, scared he would hurt them to get me to come back to him. That sentence was a stretch. I had never belonged to him to come back to him, anyway. I had never given in to his constant and persistent affection. Was it affection? I was a stranger to this feeling and more than that I was a stranger to this situation. There weren’t enough books to help me understand how to handle this situation. I knew he had charmed his way into many families and their connections, wanting and needing followers to gain a bigger following. I couldn’t trust anyone to help me.
The newspaper on the table of my little flat was almost untouched. I didn’t need to read further. The weird disappearances on the front page were enough for me to know and assume. He was calling for me like a serpent, working it like a charm. And I was lost and isolated, unsure of what my next moves would be.
I could go further up north, and enjoy a little bit of the scenery before moving to the next country. My getting-away plan was slow. I couldn’t get everything into motion as fast as I would like to. My fear of being caught was too great.
After a few more years in hiding, maybe then, he would stop. Maybe he would forget. It felt like I was lying to myself, whenever I was trying to convince myself that he would just give up. He wasn’t one to give up. Perhaps that was why it had gotten as far as it had by now. But I, myself, was not a quitter either.
I refused to let him have me.