Valar Morghulis
It’s nearly 4am and I’m too anxious to sleep. So I decided I owe him this post.
The first time I heard about Harry Potter was in 1999. I was nine at the time, and while I already loved books, The Sorcerer’s Stone only interested me in a oh-look-that-cover-is-cool kind of way.
Months later, I found it at the school library some two weeks before the movie was released, and when I went to watch it, I had managed to read only fifteen chapters, but really, there was no turning back.
I can say that Harry Potter pretty much defined the way I think about books and about a whole lot of things; My parents taught me to love books, but Rowling taught me how to dream with them.
These books have been with me for half of my life, and if I could talk to her, I’d only want to thank her. I would thank her for making girls with brains, for making me want to have six ginger brothers, for making me secretly wait for a letter every year, for making me dream with a faraway castle filled with witches and wizards, for making me despise cars, and trains, and airplanes, because it would be a THOUSAND times cooler if you could just turn on the spot and vanish (and it only takes Destination, Determination, Deliberation!); I would thank her for making me cheer for a quidditch team louder than I’ve ever done for real players, for writing a story that has given me friends, hope, joy, love; that made me hate characters so passionately that I imagined the most painful deaths for them; and also for making me love characters so much that sometimes I’ve wondered if could love a real person that much, no matter how weird it sounds. I would thank her for making me cry, for making me laugh, for making me believe that friends are more important than boyfriends, for making me whisper accio before I pick something up.
I love Harry Potter because more than once in these ten years those books gave me comfort. If couldn’t talk to anyone, I would get lost in them and all the problems would look smaller. And that is their true magic. Rupert said that he has always pointed out many reasons why he likes playing Ron, but the truth is that Ron is his hero. And yes, Harry is my hero. He’s stubborn, and he’s jealous, and he’s selfish, and sometimes he’s a whinny, and so stupid I wanted to pull him out of the page and punch him. But that’s what makes him feel so real.
Now that the end is hours away I know it will hurt the way it did when I read the last page of Deathly Hallows four years ago, and I decided to write this before I watch the movie, so that it won’t be caught in post-movie hysteria. Every time there’s a new movie I complain endlessly about changes and made up scenes, and about how they got it all wrong, and how they ruined it, but I’ve promised myself this time I won’t care. I’ll go there, and I’ll watch it, and I’ll cry my eyes out, I’ll enjoy every minute of it, I’ll sit there until the credits end and they turn on the lights. And then I’ll be able to say that I’ve stuck with Harry. Until the very end.
