What To Feel
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𝕺phelia didn't have a good memory of the abandoned toilets, which is why she had stopped going there for a little over a month. The story was that she and a friend of hers had been trapped in a toilet stall there and had to be rescued by a prefect. But reliving that moment was not the reason she was back in the seemingly dirty, dark place. Earlier that day, during breakfast, she'd received an owl from her parents. Due to her habit of reading the information on the envelope first before opening it, she noticed a sentence that usually shouldn't have been there. She recognized the handwriting as her mother's, who probably knew about this habit of hers, hence writing that specific sentence on the envelope instead of in the letter. "Read this letter somewhere private." Ophelia thought of it as weird, but a slight worry crept inside her. Had something happened while she was away? She had instantly left the Great Hall and walked to the abandoned toilets; the last place anyone would come and get her if she was needed, and the place someone was least expected to be found at, at least in her opinion. Going inside a stall and making sure to close the door softly so that it doesn't get stuck, Ophelia closed the toilet seat's lid and sat on top of it. She opened the letter and started reading the relatively short letter:
Ophelia did remember her grandmother, although only in tiny bits in her memory. She didn't remember how she was, only who she was and what she looked like. They talked every now and then via Video Call when she was at home, but she hadn't seen her face-to-face in so long that she was, for Ophelia, more like a distant relative than her grandmother. For that reason, when Ophelia got this information about her death, she didn't feel anything about it. Sadness wasn't present, since she didn't really know that woman. She could understand her parents and brother being sad, and probably even crying their eyes out. Her brother always had a better relationship with their relatives than she did, merely because she never knew what to say to them and only came to converse in the simple and typical "Hello, how are you?". So, yeah. Ophelia felt indifferent about her grandmother's death. Nazanin might've been a good woman; her funeral probably would have been filled with flowers and tears. But Ophelia wasn't there, and she would probably never be there. If she ever visited her grave, it would be as if she were giving flowers to a stranger. In a way, her grandmother was a stranger to her. Reducio 1Chehelom: Chehelom translates literally to "the fortieth," and is a traditional Persian, Shia Muslim, and Central Asian memorial ceremony held 40 days after a person's death. |
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