Admitting / Accepting Love

August 20, 2013

Dear Professor Lupin,

Why did it take you so long to admit you loved Tonks as much as she loves you?

Yours,

Stagdoe

Dear Stagdoe,

Love is a powerful, and wonderful feeling. It can grow from the smallest affair or interaction and become an all-consuming, ever-present care and devotion towards another. For somebody in my position, with my affliction, love is not easily welcomed. Just about as soon as I knew that I loved Nymphadora, I resolved to never tell her.

Loving someone else, or being loved by someone, should never be a burden. But it very easily would be, you see, because I could never offer a person the safety and stability of an ordinary lifestyle. And even if the person in question wasn’t interested in an *ordinary* life-style, as Tonks herself told me time and again, the fact of the matter is that I felt that to love someone would be to put them in danger of myself.

As a youth, I watched as my mother and father fled from town to town, guiding and protecting me – and protecting others – from my terrible secret. They were never able to settle down as long as I was with them. I knew that other people that I had loved, and others who loved me, were affected by my curse and I felt I burdened them in ways that it would be unfair to burden another again.

This is why I hid my feelings for Tonks, from Tonks and others. But an important lesson to learn, is that every choice in life carries risk. To love, not to love… both are risky. And if someone is willing to share the risk, unconditionally and completely, and you want nothing more than to be with said person, it becomes a decision between being happy and being alone. I made the choice, though it wasn’t easy, to give up the isolation that had become me for so long. The true wonders of the universe were revealed to me, once I did.

Sincerely,

Remus Lupin