The End of an Era

"It's not the end of the world - in fact it's not even the end of the summer."
- Bowling For Soup, Shut Up And Smile

The final Harry Potter movie was good. Wrecking Ball didn't even make fun of me for crying like a baby. He sat with me through the credits and then took me home with him (it wasn't our original plan, but I didn't want to be alone).

I still don't know what to say about it though. Now, it feels like something major is missing in my life. I remember wishing at one point that the movie would never start, that they would never let us take our seats in the theatre - I wished that I could just stay in that line forever with the people who cared about the series as much as I did. The crowd that was there around 10 am was the best. We sang together from the Potter Puppet Pals and the Very Potter Musical.

On the bright side, re-reading the books gives me as much pleasure as it ever did. More, really, because now I can look at all the foreshadowing that was present that I didn't know about. As for re-watching the movies, I see less appeal in that. The movies were never as good as the books. But I'm having my "series is over" crises now and not four years ago when the book was first released, because at the time I postponed the majority of my feelings of loss by saying to myself that I could still wait for the last movie.

Now there is nothing left for which to wait.

Harry Potter

"Severus Snape wasn't yours," said Harry.

- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

In twenty hours I will be watching the opening scene of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two. In a way, this is something that I have been anticipating for ten years now. I read my first Harry Potter book in the third grade. I still remember what the bookshelves looked like when I picked it up at a book fair and decided this was the book I wanted to bring home. They were about as tall as I was, and mainly covered with titles similar to If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (the U.S. version) was on a shelf at about waist height to me. Somehow I managed to read the third book before I read the second; I suppose I must have been too young to particularly care about how wrong that is. I pre-ordered a book for the first time with the fifth, OotP. Incidentally, that was the first movie for which I saw the midnight premier. I went to the midnight book release for the seventh book with my mother, and we read the first chapter together on the drive home: I read it aloud by the street lights we passed under, and finished it as we sat on the couch in the living room.

Now I am sitting in my bedroom wearing a Slytherin house costume, consisting of an emerald green pleated skirt, a blouse with the Slytherin logo on the left breast pocket, and a black tie which I untied a few hours ago when I thought I might go to sleep. When I made the choice to wear this costume, it was only because my green skirt is actually intended to be worn as part of a school uniform, and my only other pleated skirt is rather... slutty. Having done many quizzes on the subject, I am fairly confident that the house I should be dressed as is Ravenclaw. However, I am not upset to be wearing Slytherin colours. After all, Hogwarts had two headmasters through the series, and "one of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew."

I can't really find words to describe how I'm feeling. I've joked that the release of this film is the end of my childhood, but in a way that describes it better than anything I could put together. These books have been in my life longer than my little brother has. My relationship with them has lasted longer than any friendship I have ever had. I have read them so many times that my paperback copies (1-4) are all dog-eared and held together by tape. Even the hardcover books are starting to show signs of wear and tear from how many times I've read them. The only exception is book seven, which I have only read in its entirety twice. I have read chapter thirty-three, "The Prince's Tale" one extra time. I just can't bear to read it. The character death is one thing that's hard. The destruction of the school is another. The worst thing, though, is just reading it and knowing I won't be waiting excitedly for another book ever again. I tried to love the Twilight series the way I loved Harry, but the two aren't even close to being comparable.

"Its not something you can just kind of forget about because it's been my childhood.... it's going to take a while for me to fully accept it..." - Rupert Grint in an interview.

"Always."