fundamentals of love ; james sirius potter

24. pov: you never grew up, it's getting so old

There was this one time when my dad, papa, Jimmy, and I went fishing a few summers ago.

We were all at the beach house, a cottage in North Devon that the family had owned for decades, everyone was loading up the boat early in the morning to get ready for a full day of fishing. We'd spent the day before making a variety of sandwiches with the overpriced Deli meat I'd bought with nonna. There was always this sense of anticipation that hung around us during times like these, we never knew what we were going to catch but we always knew we were going to have a good time.

I was fifteen going through a serious identity crisis. Jimmy was twenty and currently out for the season because of a major concussion. We were in completely different parts of our lives, we really were, but it didn't feel like it. Jimmy never really grew up, he was always frozen at seventeen when he became this hot shot quidditch player. And I guess I was never really given the chance to be a kid, I always felt decades older than who I really was.

"Jimmy," I called when dad and papa were busy arguing over whether to use minnows or nightcrawlers. "Who do you think I am?"

He'd given me a confused look, but he went along with my nonsense like usual. "How the fuck should I know," he replied. But, then he caught the look in my eye before I lowered them to stare at my fishing pole. Jim immediately softened. "Well, I think . . . you're the best parts of everyone in our family. You'd think Hugh would be the favourite because he's the youngest, but everybody likes you the best."

I smiled, as I started to reel my line back in. "But what does that make me outside of our family?"

"You've got to figure that out yourself. People can tell you what they think of you all the time, but that doesn't mean much because it's all about you and you're opinion at the end of the day."

That wasn't what I wanted, I needed a concrete answer not some philosophical statement. "Alissa Flint said I didn't have a personality," I finally told him, revealing why I was feeling this way. "That's not what I want, I don't want to be so forgettable that nobody knows a single discerning trait about me."

"Her only personality trait is being a bitch so she can't say much," he said to me.

"That doesn't really help."

He shrugged. "You just need to stop caring what other people think, do what makes you happy instead."

And, Id stopped after that because as much as I loved Jimmy, he'd never be able to understand me in this area. Jim was confident, Jim had learned to do things for himself, Jimmy knew who he was. I was none of those things.

All I knew was that when people liked me, I felt like I was worth something. When people disliked me, it felt like my whole world was crashing down. Nothing made me happier than validation in all of its forms. Something about knowing you're doing something right and well has always made me feel like I was good enough to exist otherwise I was just a waste of space.

I'd told James about this before, how when I made people happy and was giving them parts of me, it felt I was worthy of existing.

When we would sit on the boat for nearly twelve hours, everyone always used it as some time to self-reflect. Most of the time none of us talked, music would play in the background (Jimmy and I chose the music so it was always depressing, either Coldplay or Taylor Swift), we'd all stare at the ocean and wait for something to bite our lines. When you're in the middle of the ocean and a song that was written for Gwenyth Paltrow's father's death is playing, you realise how much of yourself you hate.

(I caught a small rainbow trout that day. Jimmy took a picture of me smiling while holding the fish in my ugly overalls. My dad framed that picture and it sits in his office alongside dozens of other pictures of me, I always pretend to be embarrassed when I see it, but I secretly love it because that's the most fatherly thing to do. To always think the ugliest pictures of your child is the best one.)