Another one down. The exhaustion is a physical ache that settles deep in my bones, but the mental fatigue is worse. It’s the constant vigilance, the fear that this thin veil of normalcy might shred at any moment.

I try to write. I try to read. But the words just swim. The secret is heavy. It's always heavy. But after a night like this, it feels like an actual physical burden, crushing me.

Lily's talking about James and his 'scientific research' into attraction, and Sirius is brooding about 'impossible love'. It's all so... loud. So public. And here I am, navigating my own uncharted territory, trying to make sense of feelings I never truly acknowledged until recently.

It's confusing and liberating and terrifying all at once. Grant... he understands things I can't articulate to anyone else. There's a freedom in that, even if it adds another layer to the carefully constructed walls I live behind.

Every day is a performance. A carefully curated version of myself that can exist in the light. The tired, bookish prefect who's a little clumsy, a little quiet. Not the creature of instinct, nor the one with desires that don't fit the expected mold.

And the closer we are, the more acutely I feel the distance created by the things I can't share. Will they ever truly know me? Would they still want to, if they did? Sometimes the hope for honesty is a greater burden than the lie itself.

It's a phantom limb, this grief. Today, I saw two fifth-year Gryffindors shoving each other in the corridor, laughing. One of them had this wild look in his eye, a bark of a laugh that was so sharp and familiar it stole the air from my lungs. For a split second, I saw him. I saw Sirius. Not the haunted man from the papers, but the boy who used to trip me in these same halls and then pull me into a headlock, grinning like the world was his personal joke.

The memory was so clear it hurt. It was a physical blow. And then it was gone, leaving this hollowed-out space in my chest where that friendship used to live. It's a ghost I can't exorcise because no one else knows he's dead. Or rather, that the boy I knew is dead. What's left is something I don't know how to mourn. How can you miss someone who the world thinks is a monster, and who you know is a different kind of ghost entirely?

It’s the silence that’s worst. The empty space next to me where a stupid, reckless comment should be. I hate it. I hate him for leaving this silence.