In second grade a book found its way into my hands by reasons unremembered. That book was Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone. You know the rest, like every other kid at the time I was absolutely enthralled with this fictitious world for basically the next decade. I would wait in painful anticipation for every new book and movie and be overwhelmed with joy when they were finally released, up until high school when that obsession toned down a considerable amount. At heart I still loved the series and when the final movie was released I felt differently than I did with the others. Instead of an obvious eagerness towards viewing it I had a vague sense of apprehension and reluctance. I waited a full week until I went to see it, and when I did I found it to be quite good but that’s not the point. It was one of the saddest moments of my life and it had nothing to do with the actual content of the story, it was what it represented. Some of my earliest childhood memories were in second grade. I was moving to a new town, I was gaining new friends, and also a new favorite book. That book grew into a series and that series gained more and more followers and soon became a cultural phenomenon. It always remained personal to me and when it came time for the final movie, it was the summer of my senior year. The same time that my favorite fantasy world’s stories would cease to be told my real life fantasy world that I called high school was ceasing to exist.

-Joe Guadiana