I did it!
Here's my profile. Here's what I wrote:
"To Lauren, here's your very first grown up book. Hope you enjoy it lots and lots, love dad and mum. 26-June 2003"
"The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive."
On the 8th November 2001, the world as I knew it was turned upside-down. That was the day that the Potterverse became a part of my life.
I was five years old when I went to the cinema with my aunt, uncle, mom and dad to see
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone; we didn't know what the film was truly about, but the reviews said it was good enough so we watched it. Three hours later, when we emerged into daylight once again, our minds were buzzing about what we had just seen. A boy with messy black hair, round glasses and a lightning scar fighting an evil Lord with - most astonishing of all - magic.
I soon decided that
Philosopher's Stone was the best film I'd ever seen, and decided to learn as much about it as possible. That was when my mom, being the best reader in our house, started researching the Potter series. She found out that there were four books under the title of 'Harry Potter', one of them being the novel of the film we had just seen. However, due to life getting in the way, and my indifference for reading the novel version of the film, we soon forgot about finding the books and settled for watching the next few films instead.
Until the 26th June 2003. I'd just come home from school, almost the end of the academic year, when my mom said "We have a surprise for you - you're going to love it." Immediately, I was on guard; my parent's ideas of 'surprises' that I would 'love' were usually very good, but there's always the chance that it will be something either highly embarrassing or something that you would never use in your life. Luckily for them, my parents were right: the surprise was a first edition version of
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I can remember just sitting there, holding this heavy book in my hands, gazing at the phoenix on the cover, the bold red 'Harry Potter' against the yellow background, feeling absolutely gobsmacked. Here was something that I had, all those months ago, decided that I wouldn't touch. I felt like the most special person in the world at that moment, being the only person in my class who had the book.
There's always that feeling when you crack open a new book: the creak of the covers opening for the first time, the resistance that the covers give you when you try to hold them back to read, the crisp white pages that still smell of ink from the printers. This book had it all, and it being the first, in my words, 'proper' book I owned, I knew there and then, sitting on my sofa with my parents watching my reactions nervously, that I would trasure this book for as long as I lived. After opening it to the inside cover of the dust cover and reading the plot, some blue writing caught my eye. It was in my dad's usual handwriting, obviously written in fountain pen, the first line tapering off in an upward direction instead of staying in a neat line. It read:
'To Lauren, Here's your very first grown up book. Hope you enjoy it lots & lots, Love dad & mum. 26 - June 2003' followed by two lines of neat 'x's. I could feel my dad's eyes on my face as I read this. In one swift movement, I jumped up, clutching the book, and freaked out over him writing in a first edition book. It didn't go down well with him, but there we go.
Of course, barely anything made sense to me in there; having not yet read the previous books, I found myself wondering what really had happened 'last June', who 'Cedric' was and, more importantly, who 'Sirius Black' was. I finished reading the 766 page book five days after starting it, feeling more confused and excited than I had done before. I had to get my hands on the first four books.
So every time we went out, we looked everywhere for the previous books. We ended up buying them in such an odd order:
Philosopher's Stone, Goblet of Fire, Prisoner of Azkaban and finally
Chamber of Secrets. Immediately, I read
Goblet of Fire and learned who Cedric was and the events in the Graveyard. I learned about the Riddle House and deduced who had killed them when Frank Bryce was blamed for the murder. I learned not to trust Barty Crouch Jnr, Igor Karkaroff or the fake Moody. It was the darkest book I'd ever read. Followed quickly by the first, second and then third books, I found out everything that J.K Rowling had released about her world. I felt like a part of the Potterverse in a way I never had before.
Finally, on the 16th July 2005, after just under two years of waiting, I got my hands on
Half Blood Prince. I had no doubt that it would be an amazing book, but thought that it could in no way compare to how I felt when I had first read
Order of the Phoneix. I wasn't wrong: it didn't have the same feeling as when I first stepped into the Potterverse by page, or even by screen, but the thrill of reading about Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts made sure that I didn't put the book down for 13 hours, not even to get from Waterstones to my car. I was engrossed, trying to guess what was going on, why Malfoy was acting so oddly, happy that Harry was Quidditch Captain but suspicious of Snape. Nothing could have surprised me more when I found out how Malfoy had sneaked the Death Eaters into Hogwarts - the same vanishing cabinet that the Weasley twins had forced Montague down in the previous year. How ironic, I thought.
The 21st July 2007 was a tough day for me; I had left my primary school for the last time the day before, would be leaving all my childhood friends behind to enter the realm of Hell, more commonly known as Secondary School. There were two things that kept me sane that last day: the knowledge that tomorrow would be the day that I got my hands on
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and also the fact that my friend's birthday party was the following monday. The book absolutely surprised me when I bought it; I don't think I had expected to see Harry, Ron, Hermione and what looked like Dobby wielding the Sword of Gryffindor being attacked by money and jewels. Hogwarts on the back cover brought back so many memories about the times that the trio had spent there and made me apprehensive about what they were going to do now that they weren't going back there for one final year.
It was the first time that I had read the book before my mom had, and I made those 11 hours that it took me to read Deathly Hallows a living hell for her; every five minutes I would run in from my designated reading spot, yelling about some new twist in the plot. It made me cry when Dobby died, and shocked at the sudden-ness of Fred's death. Seeing Remus' body through the eyes of the pages made me desperately sad, as I watched all my favourite characters and my favourite school crumble around me. But still, I had to read on; I owed it to them, the fallen Witches and Wizards of the Potterverse, to complete their story. I owed it to myself.
By the time that I had cried at the battle, shouted myself hoarse at Voldemort and Dumbledore for being so frustrating, sat in a silent state of shock when Harry 'died' and laughed until my chest hurt at Peeves' song, I felt happy that good had finally triumphed over evil. So when I turned the final page on Harry's life, I felt somewhat empty. There would be no more impatient waiting for the next book to be released. This was
It.So now, after seeing
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2, I feel like a huge chunk of my life has just ceased to be. There will be no more films, no more books, no more videogames, no more speculating over the plot twists. And though I understood that Hogwarts, Harry and magic is not real, I couldn't help but feel hopeful every August that my Hogwarts letter would arrive; five years late, maybe, but here nontheless.
Maybe Pottermore can fulfill that childhood fantasy.
"The last trace of steam evaporated in the autumn air. the train rounded a corner... All was well."
