Death, Hogwarts, and a Moose

That year I liked to imagine myself as a witch from Harry Potter. It made everything more like an exciting dream that I could wake up from one day. I remember the overcast skies, when the leaves died, and everything smelled like Fall. We wore uniforms; it wasn’t a boarding school but was about as close as you could get without being one. I had some good friends and knew almost everyone’s name. It was a small school. It doesn’t sound too bad in theory; the vision and hopes were beautiful, and I guess some parts of the school and that year were beautiful, too. But most of it wasn’t beautiful in any way, so I lived in my own fantasy where I knew Voldemort would die in the end. I guess I should address the elephant in the room: my brother had an unfortunate relationship with Death herself, but good always triumphs eventually, doesn’t it? There was also a moose I saw frequently. It was a guardian, maybe my own Patronus. But in any case, the darkness wouldn’t come near me when the moose was around. Sometimes if I was far enough away from the cloud surrounding my brother, I could forget and have fun with my friends. Even when my brother was near, I would ignore the cloud because everyone has some twisted relationship with Death, so it’s not really abnormal.
There were evil teachers and kind ones, as there have always been, as well as darker students and students full of light. Maybe one day there will be a war, but the tension hasn’t boiled to that point yet. Anyway, that year I tried to be a normal student, stressing about homework and teenage drama and such, while the moose and Death always stayed on the edges of my vision.
Most times I would sleep at school. I would make different excuses, but in reality I was afraid of the dark. I hated the darkness right before dawn. I hated turning on lights because they contrasted the darkness and made my bedroom feel like a small box, with a terrifyingly lonely and unjust world outside. But most of all I hated the darkness that hung around my brother; I despised Death. So I stayed at school and made it my life. I avoided Death and my brother as much as I could. Sometimes I couldn’t avoid her though. I had to watch as she pleaded with my brother to join her forever, and I watched as he tried multiple times. There were so many tears, screams, and blood. I wanted to go to school. It’s all just a dream. Somehow, the darkness got darker as the year went on. Voldemort was growing stronger, and there wasn’t time anymore to have fun and be kids. I wept when the school year finished; there were no more distractions. Leaves lay on the ground as the hauntingly bare skeletons of trees reached for warmth and light.
We would never go back to that school, for its halls were too full of memories of blood and darkness. So we came home. The moose came, too. My brother needed serious help. His relationship with Death had damaged him the most; she had manipulated his thought patterns and made them ingrained habits. I took psychology the year after because I wanted to understand his brain, my brain. I wanted to feel in control of an awful situation that had spun off of a cliff. He started getting help, but he was still in his cloud. Death still came by, and I still stayed in my Hogwarts fantasy. The moose was even in my dreams and made sleep my safest escape.
One day I confronted Death; the tension and hatred that had been boiling finally overflowed as the kettle whistled.
“Why! Why the hell are you hurting him? Can’t you see that he’s hurting? Can’t you see that he’s broken because of you!”
“I’m sorry! It’s not my fault! He wanted me to come; he pleaded with me to take him. I know he was too young, but he wanted me. He preferred my company to the pressure of school.”
So much rage filled me, I wanted to punch something.
“How can you blame all the pain on him? How can you say he wanted it?! Why couldn’t you just leave? Why couldn’t you stop him?”
“He’s believing his own lies. He created a fantasy just like you did, but it was filled with me, and he believed it.”
I was shocked by the genuine pain I saw in her eyes. It reflected my own.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, softly this time.
I felt trapped in a scream. What do you do when someone you love is hurting themselves, when they believe their own lies? There’s no one to fight. It’s all shadows and dreams.
One day, my brother began to wake up from the nightmare. The moose had dispelled some of the fog. I had asked him to help my brother instead of protecting me. I felt safe; I wasn’t afraid of Death anymore. In psychology, I learned that people can start believing something, and that thought pattern becomes a well-beaten path. It only takes around twenty-eight days for the neurons to create a new pathway in your brain while it takes around sixty-six days and hard work to let that negative pathway become overgrown and unused. My brother had held Death’s hand as he ran down his nightmarish thought pattern over and over for the past two and a half years. It would take a lot of work to create a healthy path. But once the moose broke through the mist, he could see where his feet were and begin to take shaky steps in the right direction.
I continued to have conversations with Death. We became more than acquaintances. But our relationship was not toxic like hers had been with my brother. You know how everyone has one or two friends that really shape them and change their life? Death was that friend for me. I’ve always been one to look for the best in the villain and the beauty in broken places. I finally saw the humanity and paradoxical beauty in Death; it became almost comforting to know that she would be waiting for me at the end. We danced through hallucinations of meaning and meaninglessness. She seemed to appreciate my dark humor, and we laughed at the pain. I think what we found in each other was a place to be real and raw and tender when so often we have to act numb and indifferent to the senseless suffering surrounding us.
While Death was helping my wounds heal, the moose continued to coax my brother out of his nightmare. Swirling creatures of light often surrounded him, dispelling the shadows. They looked like Patroni of beautiful souls, some of the greatest people to live. The psychological work was hard, yet he did it and walks a new path now. His scars healed, and he began to laugh again. I no longer needed to cope through my Hogwarts fantasy. The sun rose and the fever dream dissipated. I am still close friends with Death (who else will laugh at my jokes?), and I became friends with the moose. He’s not bad, pretty chill. There was finally green again, after the longest winter of my life.