Monday, May 28, 2007

Presence and Presents of Potter: In the Chamber

Episode Three

My legs were numb, my eyes raw. My back was curled tight over this little book, this little book that seemed to exert some phenomenal pressure as it rested on my lap.

My lips were parted, perhaps in awe, perhaps in anticipation of a scream. Maybe to ensure that I continued to breathe as my desperate friend fought off those terrible symbiotic monsters. With him I felt the stab of betrayal in a blind and foolish trust; swallowed the agony of helplessness, of fear like shards of frozen glass as the dreaded answers came. Deadly serpent and fatal dream together encircled my friend as he fought for his life, and the lives of others dear to us. I watched him stab the serpent and felt the terrible wave of shame and fear (and was it... relief?) as he began to die at the hands of his enemies. And the same instinct, same ice-cold realization gripped me as I watched him, as though in liquid time, stab that dark little book.

The gasp of a girl echoed in my ears- perhaps it was Ginny.

When it was over I walked through my night-darkened house, looking for a room with enough light to wash away the sense that I had died and been reborn.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Presence and Presents of Potter: Tears in the Mirror

Episode Two

I knew who they were before he did.

It wasn't a difficult puzzle. Red hair and tears in green eyes, black hair that stuck up in the back... I knew.

But when he realized, that line, that wall between him and myself... it dissolved. Vaporized, as though it had never been and never would be again.

They were there for the first time. These people who loved him, and therefore loved me, totally and without reserve. There were no toddlerhood hysterics to recall; no adolescent travesties to come between us. There was the love of two parents to their infant child, and the unbearable pain of the child, who was no longer an infant and was suddenly drowning in an ocean of colossal emotion. There were no complexities here, just that gasping sense of a flower given too much water all at once. Because... we were helpless, and helplessly alone. How to fit a love so huge into bodies so small? How to express this bruising gratitude, and give voice to the sudden, aching, unslakable lust for more? How were we to swallow this incredible pain that this love was now always... ever... trapped in a mirror?

My hands shivered on the pages, and aching, steady tears slowly washed my cheeks. The weakness of grief trickled through me, the friend of a foreign and familiar anguish like the pain of the sand, as it takes another tide.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Presence and Presents of Potter

Episode One

It was a bright, crispy sort of day, one of those days where the seasons melt together and create a dizzying sort of barometric blur. The cold was too warm, the sun was too milky, and the wind was at once too harsh and too mild to retain a coherent identity.

The school bus whined to the corner, and after landing flat-footed from our hop down from that oversteep last step, my sister and I began to make our way home. We were engaged in an ongoing and well-disguisedly monumental battle of wills.

The words of the argument, I do not recall, but the sentiment of "No, I told you, I'm not going to read it!" had certainly emanated from my side of the discourse. "It's really, really, really good!" was just as surely the force of my sister's answering argument."

Just tell me what happens," I know I said, brassly displaying my 12-year-old aptitude for literary flippancy. "Fine," said she. "So there's this boy named Harry-"

"Well, duh."

"And he's an orphan, and he lives with his aunt and uncle, who don't like him. They tell him to go to his room while they have a dinner party... but when he gets there, there's an elf called Dobby on his bed. Then-"

"OK!" I said. My eyes slipped to the sidewalk beneath my feet, a small span of concrete that remains dear to me to this day. "OK," I said, without really knowing why. "I'll read it."