It All Ends.

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You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be. - Albus Dumbledore

I was sitting in the hallway of my high school, waiting for driver's ed to start and sneaking glances at the boy in my group who I thought was cute. He was sitting against the industrial brick wall, deeply buried in his book. And I felt a little pang of jealousy.

He was reading "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."

I had just come off a summer working my first real job. It was a very demanding position: part-time summer school receptionist at my junior high school. My favorite part of the job? Since there was a lot of downtime, I was allowed to read a book when I had nothing else to do - which was often because I was efficient. My mother had bought books 1-3 in the Harry Potter series, hoping my brother would give them a try and discover he loved reading.

Instead, her voracious reader of a daughter quite literally stole them all and devoured them in a matter of days, savoring every last word of this new, magical world she had stumbled into. I never wanted it to end, and I couldn't wait for more.

So as I sat in that humid hallway on a Texas fall afternoon, it wasn't the Indian summer flustering me. It was jealousy of the boy getting to experience Harry's world for the first time. I was already a part of it, and while I still enjoyed every re-read of the books, it wasn't quite the same as those first breath-taking moments.

I love that feeling when a book sweeps you up and transports you to another place. For me, reading Harry Potter was exactly like going into a Pensive: you press in head-first and fall into another world where you linger as long as the words let you.

Like most fans of the series, the series has defined the last decade for me. I began reading it halfway through high school, and the final book was released the summer after I graduated from college and began my first "real" job. Perfect bookends in deciding who I wanted to be and who I ended up as.

I've spent countless hours reading and re-reading new books for clues. (And I squarely blame Harry Potter for my obsession with LOST.) I spent a week thoroughly depressed after completing book six because my favorite character had been killed - and followed that up with what Amanda H. and I called "Harry Potter therapy" during our lunches at the bakery, trying to decide what the Horcruxes were and who the heck RAB was.

I sat in long lines with Tammi, Mel and Julie for books 5, 6 and 7, respectively, restlessly waiting for the moment I could begin tearing through hundreds of pages. I read book five as slowly as possible, just to make the experience last a little bit longer. I stay up nearly an entire weekend reading the final book, and took off work Monday so I could sleep.

I've dragged almost every friend I have to a midnight movie showing, and returned for repeat viewings with certain friends and family so we could watch the movies together. (And while I love them, they are still no where close to how all-encompassing the books are.)

As I anxiously count down the minutes to sit through my final midnight showing of a Harry Potter movie, and experience the magic of this world I love one last time, I feel like I should be immensely sad that it's all over.

But I'm not.

I wasn't that way with the final book, and I'm not that way now. At this point, I'm echoing JK Rowling in saying the following: though this series defined my own transformation from child to adult, much like it does Harry's, I can always, always open book one and start the journey all over again.

And that is what I love so very much about books. They're magical: they hold people and moments frozen in time forever so you can return as many times as you'd like and re-experience their world and story over and over again to your heart's content.

I might not be able to go back and relive my life to perfection, but I can always fall back into a good book and live in that world again, just for a little while.

For that, I will be forever grateful to Harry and JKR.