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I remember the first Muggle I ever saw. He had gotten lost and wandered into the forest bordering my childhood home.
I remember a drop of water swelling to fall in the kitchen sink, and an owl coming through the open windows.
I remember the embroidered pillows on my mother’s bed. I sometimes fell asleep between them, then woke up in my own bed.
I remember watching you across the Great Hall. Everybody else was also watching you, but you did not notice.
I remember the colour of his skin, like bones.
I remember the bitter taste of sleeping draughts.
I remember supermarket ice-cream. Escalators. Fake plants in dark corners.
I remember the first time a man touched me. I have forgotten his name, but he slid his hand under my shirt with startling purpose and pulled me close to him.
I remember my father saying his father had not loved him.
I remember chairs piled high outside of cafés early in the morning, and a war memorial stained by rain.
I remember seeing your photograph in the papers and wanting to die.
I remember falling asleep on trains.
I remember waking up next to men I did not recognise. They all had mobile phones and expected me to have one too.
I remember walking with you into a church, somewhere on the continent. Neither let go of each other’s hand. Later, at the hotel, we laughed about it. It was still new, laughing together.
I remember the echo of my heels in the empty courtroom.
I remember the sand castles I had the elves build on the edge of the rose gardens. I ran over them with my naked feet, feeling big in a world I already resented.
I remember thinking I would one day get married to a beautiful girl in a white dress.
I remember a deep sense of relief when my father died that I pretended not to recognise.
I remember following you down a narrow corridor, heart beating wildly.
I remember lying still in a foreign bed, waiting for something terrible to happen.
I remember the first time I saw a man die. He was a Muggle. He looked at me until there was no more looking in his eyes.
I remember street lights turning off in the morning.
I remember a sharp pain in my wrist; the blood turning into black ink; his smile showing teeth.
I remember my distorted reflection in a chandelier at a formal dinner, and how, at that time, I thought that was an apt metaphor for my life.
I remember fantasies of kneeling in front of you.
I remember the buzz of a refrigerator in a flat high in the skies. I had never been farther from home.
I remember two cups of tea getting cold between my mother and me.
I remember fantasies of you sneaking into my four-poster and pinning me to the mattress. In the morning, I would pretend I had been asleep and be spared the shame of my desire. Even in my mind, I could not face you in the daylight.
I remember not touching myself while fantasising about you. I was afraid something irremediable would happen to me if I did.
I remember snow gathering on the windowsill of our bedroom.
I remember just the two of us in an elevator, and a dozen purple memos.
I remember listening to a Muggle complaining about the heatwave for an entire night. In the morning, I went home and cast a cooling charm over myself.
I remember the first time you came to watch me in court. I had been a prosecutor for three years, and the defendant was a former friend of my father’s. (He was found not guilty, despite being guilty.)
I remember walking with you into a bar, not sure if it was a date, or a misplaced effort at reconciliation, or a bet you had lost, or an order given by your superior, or a joke played on me by the ghost of my father.
I remember deciding not to care anymore that I am a disappointment to my mother.
I remember thinking of you every time I saw somebody wearing glasses.
I remember looking at the portrait of my grandfather, and not at my father crouched on the ground. He might have been crying, and I did not want him to resent me for witnessing it.
I remember your fingers on my nape, fanned out.
I remember telling a Muggle I had met hours earlier that the headmaster of my school died because of me. He did not believe me, and for the rest of the night I could act as if I did not either.
I remember seeing a photograph of my childhood home and not feeling anything.
I remember negotiating parole terms over my desk, and how I couldn’t concentrate and let you get away with too much.
I remember candlelit dinners I wish I had cancelled.
I remember masturbating under my desk after you left my office, disgusted with myself.
I remember your hand against my lips; pressing my mouth into your knuckles.
I remember thinking about the day we met as I lay on the floor of the bathroom, bleeding. I thought you had killed me, and I was relieved I had been right about you all along.
I remember looking up from my drink and seeing you. I had a Muggle’s arm around my shoulders. I was high or drunk or both. In the morning, in my prosecutor’s robes, I was sure I had imagined you.
I remember crying in a man’s arms after we had sex. I’m sorry, I repeated between sobs, but I was relieved. I had not cried in years.
I remember bringing sleeping draughts to a boil.
I remember kneeling in front of you.
I remember Vincent’s laugh.
I remember following you outside through the labyrinth of corridors; the night was cold; I wanted to kiss you.
I remember how much I wanted to make it work, and not knowing how.
I remember being scared that he would look into my mind and search for your name. I was sure I would die because I was in love with you.
I remember being fucked by you in the backroom of a church on the continent.
I remember counting the days (twenty three) since your last owl.
I remember thinking I alone was rotten, and everybody else just flowed through life.
I remember when you accused me of sleeping with Muggles because with them I would not have to be known, and I accused you of sleeping with me because you needed to have a villain in your life, and the next morning we did not kiss goodbye.
I remember a night; some work event; drunk; you, sipping your drink with a bored expression; an offhand comment that turned into an argument; the thrill of quick-fire exchanges, barely held by the thin strip of logic I could summon in my state; how hot I grew when you rolled your eyes at me; how exciting for me that you always could see through my mask of respectability; just the two of us, scream-whispering at each other; the night frozen around us; the secret knowledge that soon I would come, thinking of the hour I stole from you.
I remember telling you we should not tell others about us. (I was scared of what they would say about me in the papers.)
I remember considering putting Vertitaserum in your morning coffee and asking you if you really, really, really loved me, or if you felt forced to say these words because I had said them first.
I remember telling you about this when enough time had passed that the laughter that followed was easy, free of bitterness; laughter at how stupid we had been in our youth, from the warm comfort of hard-earned wisdom (we were not even forty then).
I remember telling you to slap me. You hesitated, and I was ashamed.
I remember hiding the scars on my chest from you. I did not want us to play the apology game. (We played it eventually.)
I remember the awkwardness of our first dates, years after we had first slept together. I was too preoccupied with choosing the right restaurants, and you were too preoccupied with all the things you could not tell me yet.
I remember closing my eyes and imagining it was you giving me head.
I remember fucking myself in front of you, and how fast that made you come.
I remember holding on to you while below us Vincent was dying. I had no thoughts about it. I had stopped feeling like a real person months before.
I remember shutting myself into your bathroom, and how cold the porcelain sink was against my naked back.
I remember being sure you were only attracted to me because you got off on seeing me humiliate myself.
I remember punishing you for it by only ever humiliating myself and not letting you in. When you confronted me about it, I pretended not to know what you were talking about.
I remember pulling you close to me for the first time.
I remember kneeling in front of him.
I remember my hand becoming numb under your pillow.
I remember grabbing your face and kissing you in the rain.
I remember turning my back to you so you would not see the tears gathered at the edges of my eyes.
I remember coming with two of your fingers inside me, and wishing you would never take them out.
I remember believing I was a very bad person.
I remember believing I was a very good person.
I remember tracing the ridges of your scar one morning, and how that was the closest we had got to discussing the abyss that opened between us when we weren’t fucking.
I remember calling your phone when my mother died. It was the first time I called you, and my finger trembled over the button. Your name flickered on the screen, and then your voice came through. Hello. Hello. Yes. I had called other people before, but never a wizard. It short circuited my brain, my two worlds meeting and collapsing at the same time. Narcissa died, I said, and I had never called my mother by her name before. I’ll be there, you said, even if we had not seen each other in two years, and the last time we had seen each other I left before you woke up.
I remember thinking we would never work out because I could not stop dreaming of him when I slept next to you.
I remember the fire spitting back a letter that I tried to burn.
I remember trying to convince myself you were the villain and I was the victim. And later the same day, the opposite.
I remember finding out you had been in the hospital from the newspapers, and not from you.
I remember a barred door slamming shut.
I remember your expression as he fell to your feet.
I remember sitting down on a chair and having my wrists covered in chains.
I remember your glasses catching the light.
I remember your arms around me as I wept for my mother, for my father, for myself.
I remember the red door of our first kitchen.
I remember the day I understood you did not break because you could not afford to break, and not because you were unbreakable. It was raining, and we were in bed, and I was breaking, breaking, breaking, there were bits of me in every corner of the room, I had shed all my defenses, one after the other, I was raw and in love and wrong and deranged and small and unlovable, and you were stone. You had never given yourself to others to mend; you did not know how.
I remember my hand touching yours by accident when you handed me a report.
I remember laughing into your shoulder.
I remember your eyes widening underneath me.
I remember the pit in my stomach every time you walked into a room.
I remember the way you briefly looked away after you asked me if I wanted to have a drink with you, and how that was the sexiest thing that had ever happened to me.
I remember the headlines about us.
I remember looking back at our footsteps in the sand.
I remember splotches of sunshine and shadow over your face, your chest, your hands; a gust of wind; the pages of my abandoned book flapping loudly over the sound of my lips meeting yours.
I remember your hand around my shoulders; we were laughing, listening to someone tell a story about something; you pulled me close, and I let you; it was easy.
I remember walking you home, under the guise of getting some air. I was not drunk enough to dare kissing you. I was still not sure it was what you wanted from me. We stopped in front of a wrought-iron fence. Your fingers curled around the handle. Mine wiped the raindrops off the curved rod. A car rushed past us, illuminating briefly the green in your eyes.
I remember the day I understood I would not die, and instead I would have to come to terms with what I had done, with what others had done, with what had been done to me.
I remember a clink of glasses, a scrape of chairs, your hand finding mine under the fall of the tablecloth.
I remember the years it took me to see you for who you were, not for who I wanted you to be.
I remember yesterday; your smile in the morning; the afternoon walk.