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Dear Hermione,
It is still strange to me — the idea that someone like you could ever love someone like me. I turn it over in my head far more than I should, like a worry stone worn smooth with use. You with your certainty, your steady light… and me with all this noise and ruin that follows wherever I go. It never seemed possible that the two things could meet without one swallowing the other.
You always made things feel lighter than they had any right to be. Even during the war, when the world felt like it was collapsing inward, you spoke as if there would be a tomorrow worth reaching. I carried the weight of every decision like it might crush me, and you carried hope as if it were something ordinary. I think that’s when I started to realize how different we were — and how much I needed you anyway.
I remember the day of the battle more clearly than anything that came after. You said you loved me as if it were the simplest truth in the world, as if there were no question of it. I think that frightened me more than the fighting ever did. I left before you could see what that did to me — before you could see how badly I wanted to believe you.
I told myself disappearing was the right thing. That you deserved a life untouched by the things that live inside me now. That loving me would only mean carrying more ghosts.
But sometimes I let myself imagine it differently.
I imagine what it would have been like if I had stayed. If I had turned back before the gates and taken your hand instead of walking away. I imagine your fingers tracing the places I tried hardest to hide — the scars no one else sees — and calling them something gentler than what they are. I imagine you looking at me as if I were something worth keeping, instead of something that survived by accident.
And for a moment — only a moment — I almost believe it could have been real.
Then I remember who I am when no one is watching.
The nights without sleep. The thoughts that circle and circle until morning. The way I break things that were never mine to hold in the first place. The way I ran from the only person who ever said she loved me and meant it.
I don’t know how anyone could love someone who feels the way I do. I don’t know how you ever managed it.
Maybe this letter is only another kind of cowardice — words sent in place of standing in front of you and letting you decide whether I am worth forgiving. Still, there are things you deserved to hear, even if they come too late.
I loved you too.
I think I always did — I was only ever brave enough to fight everyone else.
Not you.
Harry