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title: the Tom and Ginny Show date: september 06, 2002 Tom injured was a strange thing to see. Mostly because wounds didn’t become Tom; many things become Tom (death one of them) but not injury. Not the mostly undignified process of healing and scabbing over. Wounds are stupid, and they’re even stupider depending on the way they were inflicted. The bright, startling aliveness of the blood wasn’t even interesting to watch if it’s coming from a gash that was slashed open when you tripped on a banana peel and fell onto a railway spike. Once, Tom was running down a green hill speckled with swaying dandelions of Hogwarts students; running and running into the green tomorrow. He tripped on his tatty shoes, fell into a yelping roll and came to a whimpering, disjointed mess of broken bones and blood. Not exactly the best way to get scars you could show off in the showers. I grow old, I grow old, murmured Tom unhappily (sometimes he wore his trousers rolled), as he lay in the Infirmary bed and picked at the scabs. The next time he was in the Infirmary, it was because he accidentally slipped in the shower stalls and banged his head on a bench littered with sweaty clothes. When he pulled his hand away from the throbbing pain, there was blood so red and alive it seemed to pulsate. He’d blinked. Later, the sensation of his skull-skin pulling and knitting itself together under the glow of a spell seemed strange and foreign. There is music that once played, can take you back to a memory where even the air smelled different and makes your heart pulsate to a different beat in a different time. Enter: the Diary. Now imagine you’re Ginny Weasley. Everybody hates you. Everybody. You see that mouse over there, nibbling at the breadcrumbs you’ve just dropped? It’s not thinking, thanks, it’s thinking, you’re such a fucking twat. See that wall over there? It hates you too. The walls hate you, the staircases move -- is this really the Hogwarts you wanted to come to? In the Hogwarts you wanted to go to, everybody likes you, even your brothers. Your clothes are new and crisp on your skin. Your books aren’t hand-me-downs and don’t have doodles and nasty obscenities scrawled in them. In your Hogwarts, there’s Tom, who’s nice to you and (you imagine) is tall, smart, funny, black-haired, hands-in-pockets easygoing-ness. You’re right on all counts, when you finally meet Tom. He puts his hands in his pockets and whistles an orchestral tune when you lie on your side, slowly dying, your soul whispering out from your ears, nose and eyes and straight into his mouth. He only becomes stronger, clearer, darker-haired and darker-eyed. You wanted to tell him he was a parasite, but you couldn’t, because in the beginning it was you feeding off him, asking for comfort, commitment, praise and consolation. Fleas are people too, and fleas can fall in love. Tom was your Accident, Tom was the Stupid Fall, Tom was the Whoops-I-Tripped-Over-This-Banana-Peel-And-Landed-In-This-Spiked-Pit of your life. Eleven years young and you’re it up already; nice going. No, Tom was never the wound, Ginny, you were. |
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