Tuesday, July 19, 2011

This One Goes Out to All My Harry Potter Fans

Tonight, we say goodbye to our childhoods, some of the best friends we’ve ever had, characters that were more real than fictional, the best teachers in the world, role models and for some of us, the one thing that could always bring us happiness.At some point, it was no longer a story. Somewhere among the four thousand plus words and seven books, it all became real. Harry Potter has given me everything. For a girl who lives through the lives of fictional characters and wants nothing more but to live anything but normaly, finding that scrawny boy with the lightning scar was life changing.

We have learned to be brave, intelligent, hard-working, ambitious. We have realized that you can never judge a book by its bespectacled, mysterious, small, bushy-haired, carefree cover. Forgiveness is vital, that we shouldn’t dwell on dreams and forget to live, and that we are always stronger together than apart. We know that it’s levio-SUH, not levio-SAH, that even the smallest person can be a hero, and that our expectations for schools are now impossibly high. Red, blue, green and yellow aren’t just colors and to always keep a bezoar in our pockets, just in case. We know to never pity the dead, to sacrifice ourselves before others, to never doubt the power of a library and to have faith. Above all, that the most important thing we have in this world is love. Because our love will keep this story alive. It doesn’t all end here, because we won’t let it. We aren’t merely a fandom. We’re a group of people who have been touched by the greatest story ever told, and therein our hope lies.

In the words of the incomparable JK Rowling, the woman who has changed our lives forever, “The stories we love best do live in us forever, so whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.”

Thank you, Harry. For everything