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The cafe is quaint and quiet, a warm blanket of soothing normality. That’s the first thing Ginny likes about it. When her brain buzzes with the static of holes, and she can’t stop poking at the torn edges, the cafe is where she goes.
The moment Ginny crosses the threshold the smell of coffee beans and cookies greets her.
One breath. Two.
Her shoulders inch down.
One more.
The tension in her temples fades into a background hum, drowned out by the clatter of porcelain and the hiss of pressured steam into milk.
The couple that runs the cafe is an odd match. They look like they shouldn’t work together, but they do. The woman is lithe and short. Exquisitely tailored clothes hug her body like a second skin, and her black bob is impeccably styled. Ginny has spent days admiring her, she thinks. She naturally draws attention. Her nails match her shirt—emerald green today—and she moves with the kind of self-assured ease of someone who knows how to use their body to its full advantage. Ginny likes to imagine that she used to move like that herself. Probably more athletic than elegant, but she used to trust her body before—
Ever so often, the swift back and forth of the woman in pursuit of customers, plates, cakes, and cutlery, crosses paths with the steady circle of action occupied by the man making drinks. He is much taller and bulky, like a massive tree rooted to his spot. For him, movement means gently swaying this way and that. With the amount of space he takes up and the narrow confines behind the counter, he should be an obstacle. But instead of getting in each others’ way, the pair fulfills every order in perfect sync.
All this Ginny can see right from the entrance of the cafe, and she needs to know nothing more.
Not here.
That’s the second thing she likes about this cafe. The distinct lack of expectation for more.
The man and the woman both look up at the jingle of the shop bells, and Ginny strides over to a corner table. This might be her regular spot or not— she never knows— but she puts down her bag anyway before she goes to peruse the display of cakes and sweets, and the chalkboard with the list of beverages. She picks whatever she fancies herself in the mood for and then retreats to her table, breaking out her drawing pad and her trusty little notebook.
Instead of frantically trying to catch up with the speed of life by reading her notes, she continues to watch the couple perform their little dance, and smiles. The effortless way they move together tugs at a chord in her chest, one attached to both happiness and sadness.
The emotion is there, but the memory is not, or maybe it lingers underneath the surface, trapped in the limbo between experience and memory. Either way, it is a reminder of something else. Something she is missing yet again.
She smiles despite the melancholoy. Witnessing love is always a privilege and the love these two have for each other is so deep it radiates from their very core. It is ingrained in every fiber of their bodies and shows even in the smallest interactions. It is there in his outstretched hand that closes the drawer she leaves open before she can run back into it. It is in the absent-minded way she pushes the cinnamon across the counter until it’s within his reach at the coffee machine, after a customer requested extra.
It isn’t like anything Ginny can ever experience herself.
With a wistful sigh, she opens her notebook and tries to catch up again. The couple shares a double page, each adorned with one of her earlier, more clumsy, drawings in the top right corner. Beside the images, their names are written Ginny’s script:
Pansy and Neville.
The page states that the couple owns the coffee shop, and Ginny has been coming here for about six months. However, the page doesn't say why she started coming here, only that she stops by almost every day.
Ginny blows a strand of her ginger hair out of the way and turns the page, trying to find out if she is supposed to be familiar with any of the regulars. She isn’t, and that doesn’t surprise her, but she had to check anyway. She can never be sure unless she checks first.
It’s hard to form relationships with people, if you keep forgetting them. It’s hard even to work up the energy to talk to anyone these days, because what use is there if you won’t remember the next morning? More interactions simply mean she will have more to catch up to, has to run faster to keep up. The world revolves around her at breakneck pace, while she remains frozen in time. It spins and spins, spews page over pages of information while all of it keeps slipping through her fingers. Insubstantial.
Maybe she is a ghost.
Ginny breathes out and closes her eyes, rubbing her temple in a circular pattern that relieves some of the tension. She isn’t supposed to get worked up over this; the doctors—or rather the notebook—tells her.
It’s just hard.
Every time she lets her thoughts drift, she stumbles into these holes. They buzz with static, vicious and angry. They keep her trapped in a maze, pulse pounding through her veins like thunder, as she runs and runs, while their darkness expands around her, threatening to swallow her whole.
Other days it doesn’t feel like running. Then she is trapped inside a familiar room that won’t let her out, and the walls are starting to close in around her. She does her visualization exercises then, the one her notes remind her of, and sometimes it works. She could swear there is a door, or maybe the walls turn a bit translucent, but it all dissolves in an instant once she tries to actually go there.
The pain of failure is always punishing and swift. Needles in her brain, behind her eyes, at the back of her neck. Teeth grinding together until she can taste the dust.
There is something out there; she knows she can grow beyond these walls again; she just can’t figure out how to get there. Or maybe it’s like she has tidied up her mind and put the important bits somewhere safe, only to forget where that safe storage space is—or maybe forgot what she put into storage? Damn it, she can’t even get these stupid metaphors right in her own head.
Her mocha and a slice of strawberry cheesecake clatter down on the table, and she opens her eyes to force a smile and thank Pansy. The chocolatey sweet smell is heavenly, and she immediately takes a sip of her drink, reveling in the sting of the scalding liquid on her tongue.
She’s always at a disadvantage these days and can never know herself because her body denies her the gift of learning.
Each day anew, she starts in the same place, learning she has fallen behind.
Each day anew it hurts like the first.
Each day anew, she has to try to catch up.
She’s always running but never moving.
Today, her notebook feels less like an anchor and more like a dead weight.
Ginny traces the torn remnants that cling to the binding between the pages about the cafe owners and the ones about her new physiotherapist, the one specialized in chronic pain and long-term treatment, whom she changed to after her initial injuries had healed well enough. Maybe her missing memories are more like the pages that are torn from her notebook.
Ginny has no idea who to ask about where they went or what was on them. It could have been anything; maybe she tore them out someday because she needed to take a few notes, or maybe she drew something and didn’t like it.
Or maybe not.
She keeps her notebook with her, on her person, always. It’s her guide through the inscrutable waves of her life. It’s the first thing she touches when she wakes up and the last thing she sees before she goes to sleep. She stares at it through headaches and tears and tries, and tries, to remember what happened yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that, only to be surprised anew by each tidbit of information.
The doctors have told her to give it time—hell, she has a whole different notebook devoted only to doctors and the things they tell her—but she hears their whispers too, records them in the margins between their factual statements and lets them colour the bleak picture of her pathology.
You have anterograde amnesia— the first page of her notebook reads.
—that means your brain can’t make new memories. Every night, while you sleep, your brain resets and you forget about the day before.
On the 3rd of February 2001, a car hit you on your way to hockey practice. You sustained a broken arm and severe trauma to your head and spine. When you woke from the coma, you knew who you were, but you could not make new personal memories.
The condition might be reversible; only time will tell.
Note: The doctor told your parents (but not you) that if nothing changes after a year, the damage to your brain might be permanent.
One day, Ginny walks through the streets and dreams of being a professional hockey player. The next day, she wakes up in a hospital and finds out she will always think of herself as that person, the one whose life is nothing but training and matches and winning, but she can never play again.
There is a terrible kind of poetry to it.
She dedicated her life to pursuing a dream—she had been so close—and then her body betrayed her. It doesn’t matter that the driver was sentenced to pay all medical costs, and she is probably going to receive a hefty sum in compensation once the civil case is settled. The rich kid who hit her killed her ability to live her dreams, almost as effectively as if he had killed her.
All Ginny has left now are debilitating headaches and these fucking holes inside her brain that eats her memories every night. All the things she knows about herself are no longer true. She isn’t an athlete any longer. She doesn’t do sports at all because she grows dizzy every time she exerts herself. She isn’t bubbly or extroverted or a romantic. She’s a person constantly disappointed by who she is not with no ability to build memories of who she might become instead.
She needs a respite from the despair that floods her every morning when she learns her fate.
All this energy inside of her has nowhere to go. She wants to run until she can’t breathe, until the state of her body matches the frenzy of her mind.
But she can’t.
Not anymore.
So, she draws instead.
And as if her predicament wasn’t dire enough, she’s constantly assaulted by the vision of grey-blue eyes. There is a person, blurred and out of focus. Maybe her brain is a camera with a broken autofocus, then, always trying but always failing to find that sweet spot where the world finally snaps into sharp clarity.
The eyes haunt her.
When everything goes hazy, through the glimmering static of the headaches and the soft vestiges of dreams, those eyes are the only thing that remain.
Every night…
Every single fucking night she dreams of them, and in the morning she flicks through every notebook, and there is nothing there.
No page.
No line of text.
No photos.
No clue.
All she has are the drawings she made based on her visions.
She flips through the pages of her drawing pad, leafing through version after version of these eyes, in charcoal, in watercolor, pen, pencils, markers. There isn’t anything else, and yet they are all wrong, like something is missing.
Like she is missing the point.
Ginny finds a blank page and starts a new sketch, vowing that this time she will get those eyes perfect. The slant, the expression, the swirl of blue through the grey, only a smidgen, but the flecks glitter like sapphires if the light slants just right.
She loses herself in the work, focusing on nothing more than the scratch of her pencils against the paper. The clatter of the cafe is her meditation chant, the quick strokes of drawing her prayer. A shadow there, a hint more blue around the pupil.
She’s almost there. She can almost see it: sharp lines softened by a small smile, a slim, male body. She needs more of the grey and less of the blue now, as she works her way outwards from the pupil.
White highlights to show the sparkle that made the eyes feel so alive. A curl of pale blond hair hangs into the forehead.
It has gotten too long, so he would toss his head to get it out of the way.
Ginny is working on blending the blue and grey together, making them swirl like storm clouds. He never used his hands to get his hair out of the way, because his fingers were always interlaced with hers.
Yes.
More sparkle, the blue a shade darker. Lips rosy and slightly swollen, maybe from a kiss?
The vision in her mind wavers, the vague smiling figure faltering as the stabs of pain lance through it.
The holes buzz. Furious
Ginny frowns and tries harder, adding the eyelashes. She wants to finish this. Needs to turn it into a face and not just eyes. The page blurs, but she forces it back into focus. Works harder to push past the rising tide of agony that lives inside her brain.
Minutes or hours could have passed while she hovers in this fugue state, and yet Ginny is no closer, and no further, from reaching her goal when a slender hand wraps around her wrists, pulling away her drawing hand.
Startled, Ginny gasps and barely manages to save the drawing and not drag a line across it. There is a woman in front of her, still holding Ginny’s wrist, not even apologizing for it. She’s older, blonde, and elegant, in a way only rich people are. Entitled somehow, with soft fabrics draped across her body.
Why is she here?
Why is that woman touching her?
Despite the commanding way in which she moved Ginny’s body without her consent, she doesn’t look threatening. Instead, the stranger stares at the picture on the table and looks vaguely sad.
Ginny scans her memory for any recollection of her but comes up empty, the walls of the prison in her mind pulsing with something, something, something.
The woman has blue eyes, tinged with grey, like a reverse version of Ginny’s drawing. There is a similar slant to them too, one that makes the wall pulse harder and fills her with an echo of that sadness she sees on the woman’s face. As Ginny stares, those blue-grey eyes that are real and in front of her well up with tears, and the woman takes a step back.
“I’m sorry,” she says, voice cracking. “I shouldn’t have disturbed you like this. Please excuse me… It’s just—Your drawing reminded me of my son.”
“Oh?”
The woman extends her hand again, this time in an offer to shake it.
“I’m Narcissa Malfoy, pleased to meet you—”
The sentence hangs in the air, unfinished. At least one question she does have an answer for.
“Ginny.”
“Ginny, right. You are really talented. Those eyes look so alive.”
“Thank you.” The words feel like cotton on Ginny’s tongue, like they belong to someone else or maybe another life. Does Ginny know this Narcissa? It feels like she should but she doesn’t remember, and there’s something off, something missing, something—and there’s that wall again.
Pulsing.
Pulsing.
Pulsing.
Maybe Narcissa will have answers for her.
“You said the drawing reminded you of your son? Who is he? Maybe I know him?” Ginny fears she sounds too eager, entirely too desperate for this casual interaction.
“Oh, I don’t think so...” Narcissa pauses, blinking heavily as she collects herself and draws up to stand straighter.“ My son used to be a regular here, but he hasn’t been here for a while now, not since…” Narcissa swallows and looks down again, her gaze darting to the drawing and then away again. “...not since his health started to deteriorate in earnest. He died a few weeks ago.”
The jolt of pain Ginny feels at those words does not make sense.
Dead.
A person she didn’t know died. It should be nothing to her, and yet her eyes burn with unshed tears.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Ginny says, and her voice is rough.
It’s just another dead end.
This loss doesn’t concern her.
The weight on her chest makes no sense.
She can breathe.
She does.
In and out.
Coffee and cookies.
She blinks.
Metal on porcelain and steam hissing.
She smiles and refocuses on Narcissa. “Do you want to keep the drawing?”
Tears well up again, this time they aren’t Ginny’s.
“I…really?” Narcissa asks.
“Yes, of course.” It takes so much effort to hold her smile through the pain in her head, and the pulsing in her brain, and the static hum of absence in her ears. Ginny smiles through the pain like she is sure she has done a million times and carefully peels the page out of the binding.
She can always draw a new one later.
“Do you want to sit with me?” Ginny asks on a whim.
Somehow, Ginny wants to know more about Narcissa and her son. She feels a thread of connection when she looks at this woman, and she should try to make new friends. It will be odd, sure. Ginny won’t truly remember their meeting tomorrow and will only have a brief summary in her notebook to refer to. But maybe, maybe, it will get better someday, or maybe, they will be able to give each other some comfort.
There’s a pause and with the subtle snap of a connection broken Narcissa takes a step back and smiles politely.
“I’m sorry, dear. I can’t. Maybe another time.” She looks down at the drawing in her hand. “Thank you for the drawing. You got the shade of his eyes exactly right.”
As Narcissa’s light steps retreat to the counter and Pansy smiles at Narcissa, the pounding in Ginny’s head redoubles in effort. She flips through her notebook, intending to make a new entry, but gets stuck at the torn edges of missing pages.
She trails her fingers over the frayed remnants. Follows the ragged line of loss over, and over, again as if that motion alone could make the information appear at her fingertips.
Missing.
There’s always something missing- or was it someone?
Maybe she will know again someday, or maybe by tomorrow morning she will have forgotten that she was ever missing anything at all.