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HAVE YOU EVER FELT blue? Or watched the world go by as though you weren't a part of it and felt the overwhelming disconnection from your surroundings eating at you one memory at a time? Or been consumed by an anger so profoundly ugly that nobody could identify the source because it seemed to diabolic to be of this world? Have you ever hurt just to never get hurt? Is there a way out that Sawyer hasn't seen and everyone else has and is just watching, waiting, frothing at the mouth with sick glee as she struggles around in her little glass cage, a too-many-teethed wolf without its howl?
Sometimes the nightmares prey on her inability to find the exit, a wandering mortal cursed by the gods to search for all eternity but never finding it. How does one climb out of damnation? How does one unshackle themselves from the feral anger burdened by too many trigger points? That someone can so little as breathe on her in the wrong way and flood her with the soul-choking desire to destroy?
"There are solutions," Dumbledore says, waving a hand through the air in a fluid motion. A quill and a piece of parchment shake themselves loose from under a pile of documents on his desk. Floating in midair, the quill poises itself over the parchment, ready to scribble at Dumbledore's wordless command. "The first is to remember that dyslexia is very normal. You are not stupid. You just see the world in a different way than most people."
"That sounds a lot like sugarcoating," Sawyer drawls, drumming her nails against the edge of the desk. She kicks her heels against the legs of the chair. "Like, don't get me wrong, sir, finally having a label for what's affecting the way I work is helpful in the sense that I know I'm just... different, and that I'm not going totally insane. But how do I rewire my brain so that I'm the same as everyone else? I can't. There's no way."
Behind his half-moon glasses, Dumbledore's pale eyes glimmer with amusement. "You forget, Sawyer. You have magic in your blood and you have the help of many magical people in this school. Your teachers will see to it that you receive the education that you require. We can't bend everything to fit your needs, but we will do what we can. Professor Sinistra is already looking at spells."
"Can a spell really alter my brain that much?"
"How much do you understand of dyslexia, Sawyer?" Dumbledore asks, pinning her with a meaningful stare.
"Other than what I see?" Sawyer hums, dragging her nail along the arm of the chair. A piece of lint snakes under her finger. She flicks it away, but it sticks stubbornly to her nail. "Not much, I suppose. Only that words confuse me, spoken and written. That it's not my eyes, but my brain."
How to explain to someone who's only ever read in the books what something that'd been dogging her her whole life in a way that'd make them understand what she understands? No doubt, he's already researched the medical definition, but how to tell him that she might not know the root cause or the scientific exegesis of dyslexia, but only how it's made her feel as though she's always seven steps behind the rest of the world? That while everyone was already running, she's still learning how to unfold her fingers from fists in the dirt? That all the sounds in the world have no distinctive qualities she can hold onto that can help her differentiate between words that make the same noise but are almost completely different from each other? That no matter how many tunnels she forms around someone's voice, their words and other words from outside the tunnel will always have the same frequency so everything sounds like one chaotic jumble of nonsense.
