I wish I could have had just a few more days. It’s not often that I wish for the impossible, but if only I could have had a bit more time. I’m not the same person I was two weeks ago. London changed me. Never have I adjusted so well to a new place. My entire life has been riddled with nostalgia and a yearning for the past. Until now. Not once was I homesick, not for an instant. I’d miss people, and things, but I never felt the same way as I had in the past. London took me in and made me a part of itself, and I took it in and made it a part of myself. In all my travels (which I will admit have been limited) I have never seen a place to which I took with such ease as I did to London.
This trip has also been the culmination of my personal Harry Potter saga. After the accident that killed my grandma and cousin, I stayed in St. George for two weeks. It was the first time I’d ever been away from home, and nine-year-old me was just as prone to homesickness as twenty-year-old me tends to be, and I had nothing to do but read. Her brother had the three published Harry Potter books, and I spent two weeks immersed in the world of Harry Potter. I was one of the lucky ones, the “Potter generation,” who got to experience Harry’s adolescence and maturation in time with our own. It didn’t match up perfectly, as it took Harry ten years to age seven, but it matched up fairly well most of the time.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published the summer before my final year of high school, and this summer the final film will come out. In August I will begin my final year of college. This trip was the capstone, the icing on the proverbial cake. It has been a new and renewing experience. It felt as though I was experiencing the series again for the first time. I find it very fitting that, just as Deathly Hallows mirrored Sorcerer’s Stone, this trip mirrors that during which I first discovered Harry Potter. Again, I have spent two weeks the farthest away from home I have ever been, and again I have had my life changed.
The Harry Potter story unfolded over a few overlapping decades: Sorcerer’s Stone was published in 1997, and Deathly Hallows in 2007; the Sorcerer’s Stone film was released in 2001, and the final Deathly Hallows film will be released this summer, 2011; and mine, from when I was ten to when I was twenty. At the end of this summer I will turn twenty-one, and my personal “Decade of Harry Potter” will be over. But decades end all the time, and I’m sure I will find something else to celebrate when this one ends.