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Health & Fitness

It's Magic

Why I love Harry Potter, and why I can't seem to stop.

Seventy-two days. That's it. Just a little over ten weeks, a smidge more than two months. Then it's The End. A chapter of my life will close. The final credits will roll -literally. Because on July 15, 2011, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II will hit theaters.

And I will be there at midnight, most likely in some kind of ridiculous costume, saying a goodbye as bittersweet as dark chocolate.

Perhaps you think I'm a little over-emotional or melodramatic about this. Perhaps you're right. But the Harry Potter series holds a place in my heart usually reserved for things that are, you know, real. Not fictional. So it's a testament to the books and the movies that at sixteen, I'm looking at them nostalgically, like someone looking back on a lifetime.

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I can't really remember a time in my life without Harry Potter. The first book came out in 1997, when I was 3, but my first experiences with it came when the series was already a few books deep.

I have vague recollections of a Christmas long ago, my brother unshelling a few rectangles that turned out to be books; thick, hard books with energetically pastel covers. My dad read them out loud to us. I wish I could say exactly what my initial reaction was, but I can't. I just know that by 2003, the fifth book in the series came out, and my 9-year-old self had to sneak scraps of reading because my dad wanted me to wait for him to read it to me. He loved the books too, and I think sharing the experience made it more special for him.

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But I couldn't wait, not for Harry and Ron and Hermione and wands and spells and animals with progressively more ridiculous-sounding names: Hippogriffs, Blast-Ended Skrewts, and Grindylows, oh my! I had fallen in love with magic, with the exhilaration of a world where a flick of a wand could unlock a door or create one.

Plus, there was always the unsquelchable hope that it was all somehow real.

The summer I turned 11, I was always on the lookout for any stray owls that could be carrying my invitation to study at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. When my letter never arrived, I stayed positive. My birthday is August 2, I reasoned. Maybe I missed the cutoff.

The summer I turned 12, I resigned myself to life as a Muggle. I had knowledge of a world that seemed possible, if not plausible, and I wanted to be a part of it with all the intensity of someone trying desperately to remember details of a recent dream.

I longed to meet the characters I had grown up with. Even though they were a few years older than me, I could always empathize with their relationship woes and trouble with school nemeses. But Harry's issues always had both more whimsy and more weight, because he could do magic and also had the fate of the world on his shoulders.

The movies came out through this time too, starting in 2001. I loved it all. At 7-years-old, I didn't know to critique the patched together feel of the first movie like my dad and brother did. I just knew to watch it and savor the visuals that could now accompany the images I'd held in my imagination. They were always separate, though, my Harry and the screen Harry. I love the movies, went to the last two at midnight, and dressed up for the last one, but the books will always offer me an unparallelled joy.

When the seventh book came out, I sat on my couch and read. And read. And cried. And read. Then I ate. Then I reread. And reread. And recried. And reread. Then I ate some more and started my countdown for the next movie.

I'm a nerd.

This is news to no one. But the Harry Potter series crosses standard nerd boundaries for me in a way that nothing else can ever touch. I have no shame, to the point where I've had a spell-off in the middle of Lowes with my brother. He won, but only after a solid fifteen minutes of just remembering different spells from both of us. Certain phrases trigger passages from the books. I can't hear "keep all your eggs in one basket" without remembering a conversation between Dumbledore and Snape. I've read all the books so many times I've lost track. The third, sixth, and seventh are my favorites, in that order.

And I hope that all this never changes. That I'll always be able to read these books and watch these movies and feel my heart swell with affection. That they're so entwined with my childhood and adolescence that I can't help but carry them into adulthood. Somehow, I have faith that this will happen.

Even after these 72 days are over, and there's nothing new to see or read.

This blog was actually going to be more lighthearted, but I can't seem to treat this topic with anything less than reverence, and I think that's a good thing.

I can't pin down why exactly I love these books  and movies so much. Trying to figure it out is as futile an endeavor as Ron trying to read his tea leaves in Divination, or Harry trying to get Professor Snape to like him, or Hermione trying to get failing grades on her exams.

And maybe that's the real magic.

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