I’ve come to expect the emotional drop that follows finishing a TV show or book series. I’m prone to binging my content — and giving a lot of fucks about it — so it’s disorienting to come back into myself. Sometimes it’s even painful. I’ve felt as if I’ve soaked up so much meaning from the page that I can’t grasp the meaning in my actual life . . .
I have felt this most strongly with the Harry Potter series. I read the final book with slow, heavy reverence. Perhaps because my first time reading of the seventh installment came at such a fraught time in my life — I finished the book, after reading straight through from the midnight release — in the back of a van, with my parents in the front seats, driving to see my brother in the hospital. I finished the book in the midst of a foolish, adolescent commitment to myself that I would not cry, that I would never let anyone see me breakdown. My first reading was frantic, speedy, almost uncomprehending and a desperate escape from what was happening around me.
So now I read slowly. So now I cry. So now I kiss the pages and send my comfort back in time to the teenage girl who was frightened of herself, to the twenty-three-year-old woman who stopped mid-seventh book when the depressive apathy of her new marriage finally overtook her . . .
I learned ages ago to call someone I love after finishing the Harry Potter series. To ground myself in real connections. My mom calls me first today and though my skin is still heavy, my chest tingling with that familiar anxiety of leaving the magical world behind, I find that it is not so hard to rejoin reality. I am not trying to escape from my life by reading these days; I’m trying to enrich it.
There is a line I think of often from the chapter ‘The Forest Again’: “Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?”
Today, as I put the book back into its shelf, I’m feeling like a miracle. I’m feeling love — for these stories, for my friends and family, for myself, and for my beautiful life.
“Yes — just love.”
With Love,
Natalie
❤️❤️❤️