Apocalypse Wow
No spoilers, promise.
The deed is done. I don't have words yet, not really, but I'll try.
Reading these books is really an experience without compare for me. It's intense, it's supremely painful, and it is scarily all-consuming. It took me the better part of 48 hours this time out -- I went to sleep, two nights of anguished sleep, still not knowing the endgame, something I could never bring myself to do with Half-Blood Prince. I'm not sure if it was vacation-related jetlag or just the debilitating knowledge that this was all there was, and that if I pushed myself to finish, I would have nothing left.
But I slept, and I went out and wandered the streets of Edinburgh. Edinburgh, which already feels like some kind of rain-washed dream of cobbled alleys and skulking mists, the perfect place to read Potter, but also in some ways the worst. It heightened things to the point where my whole family was silent, cranky, dying of anxiety. I stood in line at Waterstones, directly under the shadow of Edinburgh Castle looming on hilltop, and it was torture - cold, tense, not at all a celebration, as two hours went by and all I could do was watch other people pass through the cashiers (only four of them! seriously, whose idea was that, because they need a punch to the chin) and holy crap, those happy customers who got there ahead of me, clutching their damn copies, already enthralled. I wanted to jab a spork in my eye. I wanted the book, I didn't want the book, I needed the book, if I waited in line a minute longer I was gonna whoop some Scottish arse. And then I had the book, which is always anti-climactic, because the cover looks sort of stupid and it feels too light to contain everything I want. But then I opened the book and saw something I never ever ever could have predicted, a god-damned epigraph, and it exploded my brain before I even got to page one, let alone the crux of the matter.
Reading hurt. I gasped and laughed and swore and apparently exclaimed "Oh my God!" so many times that my father started teasing me. And I cried, obviously. I read through my tears, which is a skill I never thought I'd ever really need before Harry Potter came along. I got things right. I got things wrong. I was surprised more times than I could ever have dreamed, seeing as I speculated so much these five years. And then I finished, on the train home from Edinburgh, which is poetic and fitting because Harry Potter came to Rowling on a train, and on a train is where he left me. I finished, and then I stepped off the train into Kings Bloody Cross and I'm so used to closing these books with a thousand questions teeming in my brain, the heavy weight of anticipation descending on me once again. But this time I felt light and free and released from a prison, and a dream, and a spell.
Goodbye Harry Potter.
The deed is done. I don't have words yet, not really, but I'll try.
Reading these books is really an experience without compare for me. It's intense, it's supremely painful, and it is scarily all-consuming. It took me the better part of 48 hours this time out -- I went to sleep, two nights of anguished sleep, still not knowing the endgame, something I could never bring myself to do with Half-Blood Prince. I'm not sure if it was vacation-related jetlag or just the debilitating knowledge that this was all there was, and that if I pushed myself to finish, I would have nothing left.
But I slept, and I went out and wandered the streets of Edinburgh. Edinburgh, which already feels like some kind of rain-washed dream of cobbled alleys and skulking mists, the perfect place to read Potter, but also in some ways the worst. It heightened things to the point where my whole family was silent, cranky, dying of anxiety. I stood in line at Waterstones, directly under the shadow of Edinburgh Castle looming on hilltop, and it was torture - cold, tense, not at all a celebration, as two hours went by and all I could do was watch other people pass through the cashiers (only four of them! seriously, whose idea was that, because they need a punch to the chin) and holy crap, those happy customers who got there ahead of me, clutching their damn copies, already enthralled. I wanted to jab a spork in my eye. I wanted the book, I didn't want the book, I needed the book, if I waited in line a minute longer I was gonna whoop some Scottish arse. And then I had the book, which is always anti-climactic, because the cover looks sort of stupid and it feels too light to contain everything I want. But then I opened the book and saw something I never ever ever could have predicted, a god-damned epigraph, and it exploded my brain before I even got to page one, let alone the crux of the matter.
Reading hurt. I gasped and laughed and swore and apparently exclaimed "Oh my God!" so many times that my father started teasing me. And I cried, obviously. I read through my tears, which is a skill I never thought I'd ever really need before Harry Potter came along. I got things right. I got things wrong. I was surprised more times than I could ever have dreamed, seeing as I speculated so much these five years. And then I finished, on the train home from Edinburgh, which is poetic and fitting because Harry Potter came to Rowling on a train, and on a train is where he left me. I finished, and then I stepped off the train into Kings Bloody Cross and I'm so used to closing these books with a thousand questions teeming in my brain, the heavy weight of anticipation descending on me once again. But this time I felt light and free and released from a prison, and a dream, and a spell.
Goodbye Harry Potter.