I must say that the idea of reading for pleasure sounded absolutely ghastly to me until one fateful snack time in 1995 when one of my teachers cracked open the cover of a book larger than I'd ever pictured myself selecting form the library shelves of our classroom, and begun to read aloud.

My classmates and I were a captive audience, hanging on her every word, on her suspense-soaked silences. Cookies and dry ramen lay abandoned on the carpet and were replaced with the collars of shirts and fingernails.Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was different, somehow, form any other story she had read to us, or that we had grudgingly skimmed as homework. Instead of black ink on white paper, a two dimensional conveyance of information, this was a world that hung in the air above our bated breaths. This was a movie that played behind our ever-widening eyes; this was more real than any story we had ever been told. Perhaps, it was even more real for someone like me, someone who, like Harry Potter himself, had experienced extreme trauma and uncertainty at his tender age. However, for me and everyone else who has suffered in the cruelty of reality, there is no Gentle Giant to rescue you, to tell you that a better life awaits somewhere far away from your troubles. However, the possibility of hope and escape had appeared for this little boy. If it could happen for him, Why not for us? Perhaps that's what enraptured us all.

Even years later, I still found my eyes widening, projection rolling, breath shortening, at the turn of every page that a new copy had to offer. Waiting in a the endless lines outside bookstores, I become a child again, full to bursting with what can only be described as wonderment. My heart skips, bounds, leaps with tremulous anticipation until I touch the lustrous cover. That's when the calm takes over. The sense of knowing collapses around me prematurely, and by the time I close the back cover, I can already taste the next volume.

However, today I finished the seventh and final book, and found myself feeling empty; a shockingly opposite experience to the elation that inevitably followed each past installment. It had minimally to do with the storyline, though. I've realized that the the deflation I felt was completely from within myself.

When I had reluctantly let the cover fall on the last pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I also closed the last chapters of my childhood. I realize now how much of the last ten years have been dependent on this fictional little boy. He bonded my oldest sister and I, when she was sick and I read the first book aloud to her, much to her objection at first, because Harry Potter "was for babies." He made holidays and birthdays all the more exciting, and overall, gave kids and the young at heart something to look forward to each year.

Now that it's all over, I'm not sure I was ready for the untimely retirement of the very thing that held my childhood together. I know that I'll make a full recovery, and that I'll look back on the last ten years like one look upon an old friend in a yearbook. You probably won't talk to them again, but you won't forget how they helped you through the rough times so long ago.

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I've discovered that I am dangerously addicted to playing neopets. It is enormously time consuming, and at time annoying, or even infuriating. However, I can't seem to peel myself away from the screen long enough to eat.

What's worse, I have no intention of quitting the game. :)

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