All Was Well.

The Hungarian Pastry Shop. A small bakery and coffeehouse around the corner from my work in the Upper West Side with small wooden tables and very dim lamps set on the walls, was the scene of my close, of the last page turned in the Harry Potter series.



I ordered a Viennese coffee (people around probably rolled their eyes into their skulls when I first asked for a "cafe viennois" but sorry bro, I learned about them in France) and sat down around 5:30 pm, shaking, at a small table next to two undergrad-looking boys studying together who had no idea what they were in for. I had been reading on my lunch break and was getting into the thick of the final battle, and knew I was set to devour the last 150 pages here.

I ate up 70 pages hungrily, hardly touching my coffee. It got worse. I started eating the melting whipped cream for something to do. The unfolding events in the book took a heavy nosedive and I LOST it. I was sobbing and my chest was heaving, I was trying not to make a noise, but unsuccessfully, and instead emitting weird animal sounds and hiccuping. My tears were filling my glasses so I had to take them off and thankfully my vision was blurred from seeing the people silently turning around or overtly staring. I was crying so hard over the pages that they were thin and weak and I had to turn them carefully because they might rip through the sogginess. The poor boys next to me look positively frightened and kept whispering and looking over at me.

When I finished the book, I did feel closure, and relief and some faint glimmer of happiness, but I was overall so depressed and haunted by the book that I felt like I just couldn't move. I wouldn't attribute this all to JK Rowling. I would say maybe 20% JK Rowling, 40% my emotional instability, and another 40% my karma for snubbing the books and entire franchise, God is now making me the die-est of diehards.

When i got on the train to go home, reflecting on it all, I just kinda felt like this:



(I saw this picture once captioned as "How I Feel After I Finish My Math Homework" and I never forgot it, and as I sat on the train last night I thought, that's how I feel now!)

I had been texting a few people last night as I crept through the story to the end. I have had many faithful friends following me and supporting me on my first-ever journey through the series, (my own Dumbledore's Army, if you will) and I've been very grateful for them! This morning, my coworker, who has been the Hermione to my Harry on this trek through the series, said first thing to me as we got our coffee together in the kitchen area "So you finished it!" and, not that the story had left me for a second (it weighed very heavily on me and continues to) but I said... "I did, and if I talk about it, I think I'll cry..." and I started crying so then I thought, what the hell, so I brought up all my thoughts and favorite parts and we had a mini therapy session before starting our work days.

I'm not sure this 10 years worth of writing was meant to be read in less than 5 months. It's like chugging a 100-proof alcohol shot in a beer stein instead of having 5 mixed drinks spaced throughout the night. I will be suffering my emotional hangover until further notice.