Goodbye Old Friend

I suffer from separation anxiety.

I still feel a little bit homesick each time I say goodbye to my parents. I cry every time the Fellowship of the Ring is broken, every time the wardrobe closes for the last time, every time Obi Wan Kenobi falls. I even got a little teary watching young Bush bravely bid farewell to a resigning Ro… (Sorry couldn’t keep a straight face.)

Seriously though, after four straight days of doing nothing much other than sitting on the couch reading and crying, I am finally having to say goodbye to my dear friend Harry Potter. I’m taking it pretty hard. Harry’s been a part of my life for a long time now, almost ten years. That’s longer than I’ve known Dan, longer than I worked for Neal, longer that I lived in Chicago, longer than I was in improv, longer than I took voice lessons even.

As far as I know, I was the first person in all my friends and family to hear of Harry Potter or read The Sorcerer’s Stone. Like all of Potter’s friends I received some ridicule for standing by him in the beginning. Various nameless parties (now fans themselves) were highly amused by my enthusiastic and voluble endorsement of that first book and excessively loud and rapturous anticipation of each following installment.

True to form, we also got into some mischief together. Who but Harry would tempt me to sneak off to the bathroom at work once or twice just to read a few more pages!? Or get my entire family to even think about standing in line at a bookstore at midnight in Alaska. Or talk me into singing opera in a store window as part of a “living picture” while teenagers mocked me loudly safe on the other side? Ah, good times…

Not that we didn’t have some falling-outs. Our relationship was strained a bit by his meteoric rise to stardom. I thought he was getting a bit full of himself as he became so enormously popular. But how could I stay mad with a guy who got little kids to carry around 900 page books?! Who almost single-handedly reenergized the young adult fantasy genre?

It’s true that we’ve grown apart a little as the years passed. I’ve changed. Harry’s changed… I spent a lot of time while reading The Deathly Hallows exasperatedly thinking, “She did what? Why wouldn’t they just…? But why not…? How could he think that? I can’t believe he…! That doesn’t make any sense! Don’t be so Stupid!!!”

But we have such a history… I can’t forget those giddy first days discovering together the enchanting new world of magic and both falling completely in love with it. Even now, after that first infatuation has long ago worn off, I keep coming back again and again in an attempt to relive those delightful times. Nostalgically sharing year after year set to the familiar and ever revolving backdrop of the Dursley’s, the Burrow, Diagon Alley, the Hogwarts Express, Hagrid, Chocolate Frogs, Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, classes, Quiddich, Snape, Malfoy, You Know Who.

Did we really need to revisit each and every character and place in each book? Probably not. But as both Harry and I got older and our lives got scarier and more unsure… I found it reassuring to check in with those old friends and familiar faces. Knowing what came next made me feel like an insider, a cool kid, a 7th year. And it made it all seem more real knowing all the common place minutia of buying books and getting to school, going through the sorting and taking tests and drinking pumpkin juice. And I Want it to be real!

For me Harry Potter was less about reading a great book and more about shrugging on the soft warm robe of that place, spending time with Dumbledore and stalking the wondrous halls of Hogwarts side by side with my faithful friends. With each book we got to live for a while longer in that charming world and, more than anything, that passport to such an inviting, seductive place is what I will miss most.

Goodbye Harry. Thanks for bringing a little magic into my life.