It was the summer before my junior year of high school. I didn’t really think that it would happen so abruptly. That my childhood would end with such a defined climax.
I will tell you now I didn’t have some grand awakening or suffer some trauma that caused me to loose all my innocence. I still possess a lot of the innocence I had then, and I’m proud of it. It allows me to still see the world with a just a little more light.
I still referred to myself as a child. Even today, I often come up from my thoughts that mirror that of a grumpy old man to find that I am but an eighteen year old woman. At the point where I lost my childhood, I still considered myself in the full swing of it. Sure, there had been a recent reduction in playing and the line between reality and imagining had become more clear. My mind was getting darker, the stories I created were becoming darker.
I remember realizing for the first time that I member of my peer group had moved on. I was talking to a friend, and I said something to the effect of,
“Well, I mean, I’m still a kid.”
“No, you’re not,” she said in her wonderfully pragmatic and blunt way. I was shocked. When did she stop being a child? I still felt like a child. What separated me from recess was not my own inclination, but the institution that I now was a part of. Besides, there’s too much expectation and focus put on the “inbetween” years. I always liked the idea that there was less of gap between my adulthood and childhood. I never glorified being a teen. It just sounded like a time of anger and disillusionment. A time when the adults in your life disregarded what you said because it was “just angst”.
The night that I finally let go of my childhood, I was at the movie theatre. It was midnight, and I was dressed up like any good child would be. It was a special event. A symbolic event.
It was the premier of the final Harry Potter movie.
I become very attached to stories. After years of unbridled excitement for tales of strength and fantasy and imagination, I have come to realize that being a nerd is not something to be ashamed of. Nerds experience a love of story telling on a much higher level than most other people. They dream bigger. See bigger. Nerds are usually the intellectuals, dissatisfied with the mundane. They are ready to try to push the boundaries of reality a step farther. It’s only when they try to integrate themselves too much into a reality that they can never be a part of and forget to live, that such mental wanderings become dangerous.
For me Harry Potter, had been with me since almost the beginning of my schooling. At age six, it was the scariest and most exciting movie I’d ever seen about such old and wise eleven year olds. The fifth chapter of The Prisoner of Azkaban, “The Dementor”, excited me so much, I had it read to me five times. The final chapters of The Goblet of Fire got me through a difficult visit with my dad. The Order of the Phoenix was the first time I remember seriously analyzing a book. The Half Blood Prince was the first time I put my foot down with my dad. The Deathly Hallows came out on my birthday. The second to last movie (and all the other movies) got me through multiple illnesses and the removal of my wisdom teeth. I saw the second to last movie in London, my first night there, and it was the beginning of my love affair with that city.
Most importantly, Hermione Granger was and remains my role model, only to maybe be surpassed by Elizabeth Bennet, who’s first name is my middle name.
It was not even the end of the movie, and I realized that, as Harry Potter’s ended, my childhood was done. I was ready to let go. The saga was over. Harry had grown up, and so had I. I could move on beyond this. Beyond what I had known, the only life I knew how to live, into adulthood, and the world would adjust.
The Parking Brake is On 
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