Papillon

Being

Memories in your desired reality feel just as real as any other. 

I woke up this morning in the country home in France. I woke up to soft light hitting white translucent curtains. To the champagne and gold details in the room that had been mine since I was a little girl spending my summers ( and sometimes springs ) in France. The Gaunt Family Estate, or more accurately, Le Domaine Gaunt- en francais.  

We are the French split in the family tree, where the English first born son from the practically royal & pure wizarding family fell from grace. 

My great, great, something grandfather, whom I want to say was name Elijah Gaunt, fell in love with a magical creature- a veela. His 'conservative' and stringent father saw this as bestiality. 

I shouldn't have to tell you why this is wrong. 

So, thoroughly disowned, Elijah Gaunt and his (soon to be) bride fled to the French country side where he made her their family home with a mixture of magic, blood, sweat, and probably tears. Soon the name Gaunt was transformed to "de Gaunt".  & many years later, my mother, Alysson de Gaunt married 'the Lovelace boy'. 

Henry Lovelace was a copper haired English boy who came to France on business with his father- an arborist whom grows wand woods. He's also my dad. 

He and my mom met entirely by chance, and he always likes to tell the story of how he had met the most enchanting woman of his life, and that he knew he had to marry her when he found out that she was kind and funny too. 

Even now, as I type, I can see her laughing at this, haphazardly setting down her wineglass, and playfully hitting my fathers shoulder.

So I woke up Iris Lovelace. But I didn't wake up to the August light in a country I had never been to. That's how she woke up. My 'avatar'. Think the movie about the blue aliens- look it up. 

The she that is me, but the daughter of Alysson de Gaunt and Henry Lovelace, awoke kind of how I wake up on the day to day. Mad to be awake, with a cloudy head. But that didn't last long- the anger and cotton swab mind. Our heart beat fast- at the kind of rate where you can feel the pulse in your throat. She was already mostly packed with a few options available for the train ride from Paris to London. A small bag, and a plan to buy a more extensive wardrobe in London. 

The French Summers and English Autumns are very different climates after all. 

I, however, woke up to being Iris Lovelace for the very first time to wind hitting my cheeks after my mother and came through the brick way into Diagon Alley. 

It took a moment to come into being.

The way it does when you wake up & stretch. I was feeling the limbs that were mine but new. And I heard the much younger kids in awe of brooms and owls alike. 

They were the sounds that I had craved since I, myself, was their age, and yet they were sounds that I had heard in some capacity before. Relying on a whole knew schema for how to operate is such a wild time. 

"Darling? " My mother had asked as if to wake me from a stupor. 

"Coming- just needed a moment."