Chapter 1: Expecto Proposal
And You Say I Never Get You Flowers
The ground rushed beneath me, the sound of my pounding heart filling my head. Fear seized my throat, sapping the breath from my heaving lungs. The hill was steep, and every stride I took only took me a half step forward.
Twin stone walls, waist high, bordered the trail. The dirt was damp, but firm, and strips of grass ran along its sides like the mat of a frame. By my estimate, the nearest train station was eight miles by foot through the Rockefeller Estate forest. Luckily, I was a runner. Unfortunately, I was running out of time. I had no choice but to risk heading home for my passport and crypto wallet. It would be four to six hours before I could get on a flight to a non-extradition country, but I had enough saved to buy a new set of papers and a convincing digital identity. I just had to get over this hill, and I’d be in the wind.
It was only three days ago that I had received the set of clues that would change my life forever.
On Thursday, a large package appeared at my Brooklyn office with a label whose return address read “Experience Parties.” My partner, Nicole, and I were celebrating seven years together, and with some help, I had planned a scavenger hunt for our anniversary that coming weekend.
To be honest, I had taken quite a liking to my earned nickname, “outlaw,” as in, not an “in-law.” But, I knew the sun was setting on my time in the West and I could either propose marriage, or die alone — a hero.
The plan was complicated enough.
I would stage a scavenger hunt that described, in my humble opinion, what engagement meant for us both: a philosophy pretty cleanly summarized as a violent rejection of the expression, “you complete me.”
But, don’t get me wrong. I’m a romantic at heart. I know the job of any true romantic is to evoke a pure state of fatalistic obsession — the same state of mind every kid inhabits before a certain age, when anything is everything, and you’ll literally die if you can’t have something.
It’s ironic that marriage is meant to be the ultimate coping mechanism, but romance is the feeling that there’s just no way you can possibly cope.
So to evoke life or death stakes, I sampled Nicole’s first favorite mythology. The fantastical world of Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore, and Rubeus Hagrid had been a powerful allegory for Nicole ever since she first discovered it as a little girl. Born with marked features and a witch’s magnetism, Nicole felt the world bearing down on her as it did on Harry, the Boy Who Lived. And like Harry, much was taken from her without cause.
Hogwarts was a gateway for Nicole, first to literature, then to history, soon to politics, and ultimately back to drama. Now she makes movies with Aaron Sorkin.
If the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry provided an early education for Nicole, then Harry’s most dangerous quest might provide an allegory for starting our lives together.
In the wizarding world, there exists a powerful and terrible curse called a horcrux (‘hor kruks). Its caster commits murder, and in so doing, breaks away a piece of his or her soul. This broken fragment is hidden away in an ordinary object, thenceforth known as a “horcrux.” This object becomes nearly impossible to destroy, and as long as it remains intact, the caster can never be killed. The villain whom Harry must fight created not one, but seven, horcruxes.
This quest Harry must endure to eradicate seven manifestations of immortal darkness, I thought, was like the private wars we wage against the loss of ourselves in response to life’s trauma. As we face adversity, we don masks, dream up mirages, and subsist on crutches; but, by doing so, we lock away authentic pieces of ourselves. Our fight, then, is to eradicate these facades and regain our splintered spirits, to — as you’ll soon see — free our hearts from shadow.
I had watched Nicole wage war against the darkness for seven years. What better way was there to show her that I loved her than to celebrate the battles she’d won and to tell her that I knew in my heart that she’d win the war, that I believed in her and wanted her to be my partner. To propose, I’d take her on a hunt to destroy horcruxes that represented the shadows.
I didn’t complete her; she was already complete. And I wanted to be with her forever.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that I was the one in a pure state of fatalistic obsession, just a kid dumb enough to consider forever.
So now that it was established that Voldemort and my future wife were one and the same… we could begin our hunt to recover the seven fragments of her soul!
Next in Chapter 2: You Have an Owl