Eternally Yours

I knew today was going to be a bad one before I even opened my eyes.

All throughout my sleepless night I\'ve been plagued by memories I suppressed twenty years ago because of the intense emotional pain they cause me. For the most part I succeed at ignoring the stray memory or emotion that may leak out during a moment of weakness and they stay locked up tight in a little, black box. But fome rme reason, every year, for the past twenty years, like clockwork, on the anniversary of that life-altering event, the box springs open and all my carefully constructed barriers come down, leaving me with no defense against the sheer volume of thoughts that threaten to overwhelm me.

Sometimes I manage to find someone competent enough to fill in for me, so I won\'t have to be deal with the additonal stress of children or classes. If I\'m really lucky, it falls on a weekend so I can spend the whole day locked in the dungeon, dealing with my melancholy mood. Every once in a while though, there comes a time when neither option is available to me. On those days the rumor mill usually goes into overtime, working in my favor for once, by giving everyone on the premises and advanced warning about my particularly foul mood for the day. And if I\'m lucky, by the third class of the day, every student knows they court death if they attempt to step even one toe out of line. Even the teachers know better than to come anywhere near me on this day. The way I see it, the only thing good thing that comes out of the whole deal is the complete obedience, quiet, and abject fear I get from every student for at least one day out of the year.

Unfortunately for me, today, in addition to being *the* day, is also happens to be one of the few times I couldn\'t get the day off. I have to got teach the whole lot of ungrateful brats in the school.

I can not find within myself the proper motivation to get out of bed, so instead I lie here reliving some of the happier memories for a while. When I glance at the clock again I see that it\'s a quarter to eight and I realise if I lay here any longer I\'ll be late for my first class, so I rush through my usual morning routine, get dressed, and walk out the door for my first class of the day.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I step back into my quarters at the end of this long and stress-filled day wishing only for a nice hot bath, a glass of wine, and a peaceful and quiet night alone. I don\'t know how but somehow I managed to make it through the day with the only a handful of altercations, and only about a tenth of the students managed to be oblivious enough to my current mood to do something deserving of detention. The word spread quickly after the first class, where half the students committed some infraction worth of punishment, that I was not in a mood to be fooled with. So with the exception of the first two classes of the day, the rest of the children acted like model students. My biggest antagonists, Potter, Weasley, and Granger had the good sense not to say a word to me all day, and amazingly enough, Longbottom even managed not to cause a disturbance with his potion. Although that may actually have more to do with me teaming him up with Ms. Granger and leaving the class, as a whole, on their own to muck up thpotipotions, unless it looked as if they were brewing something potentially harmful to the rest of the class.

But I\'m getting sidetracked. Right now I want nothing more than to relax and try to make it through the rest of the day without incident. Maybe even sort through some of the more pleasant memories pre-shrieking shack, before I gather them all up and shove them back into the box until next year.

I am just drifting off to sleep in the armchair in front of the firen Ien I wake up to a tap on my hand. I crack my eyes open to see a house elf in front of me bearing a letter from the Headmaster. Damn.

I accept the letter from the house elf with thanks, then after opening it I scan the contents of the letter quickly. Hmm. It would seem as if my presence is needed at the Black residence, the new home for the Order of the Phoenix meetings. And from the letter\'s tone, it seems as if I am needed there immediately. I bang the back of my skull against the chair a couple of times and sigh. This summons couldn\'t have come at a worse time. I\'ll most likely be walking in on the middle of a strategy session or asked to provide some sort of input concerning one of the many races we\'ve been feeling out, holding negotiations with, even going so far as to talk some of the more secretive, and lesser known species in our search for allies against Lord Voldemort. If this meeting was tomorrow I\'d be fine, back to my usual self but today....I\'m absolutely useless. I\'d be of more use staying out of the whole meeting. But there\'s nothing I can do about it so I grab my cloak, walk out the door, get to the edge of the anti-apparation barrier surrounding Hogwarts and disapparate.