Earlier in 2016 I was on Facebook and saw a picture someone posted. There was also a short explanation of the picture. I was incredibly touched by the story and reached out to Hope L. and asked her if I could share her story on my site. She very kindly gave me permission and wrote a longer version of her story. The events of her story took place in middle and late 2015. Here it is, in her own words. Thank you, Hope, for sharing such a personal story.
What is the one thing that all of us Potterheads wish to be actually real but truly isn’t? The one thing that we all desperately would love to have? Magic; a simple five letter word that means the world to us, and I know that all of you, including myself, will defend that magic is real, that it actually exists, until we have officially taken our last breath, but deep down, very deep down, we all know that the amazing, and creative world that J.K. Rowling brought to life is truly nothing but a beautiful work of fiction; a world that we would all love for it to be real; a world that we all would love to live in; but sadly we honestly know that the Harry Potter world is nothing but a imaginary work of art that only consists in the crisp pages of books, on your vivid television screens, and in our unique minds.
But please don’t feel down or upset, because I’m here to tell you a tale of magic, and a tale of truth that actually happened to me last year around this time; a tale that changed my life in so many ways that I could never possibly have enough time to write them all down for you in this passage.
My tale begins with my younger sister who was just six at the time, and she knew how much her older sister (me) desperately loved the world of Harry Potter, but at this time she was still yet to learn about the Harry Potter stories because I hadn’t yet showed then to her. I was in my room one day putting up some clothes when she came in unexpectedly to ask me a simple question; “Is magic real?”
Knowing that this conversation would be difficult I stopped doing what I was doing to give her my full attention and replied to her, “Do you think that it is real?”
Without missing a beat she said, “Yes.”
Not wishing to upset her young hope I said what I believed was right. “Then it is real.”
Thinking that this conversation was over I returned to my clothes, but my sister asked another question that shocked me to my core. “Do I have magic?”
I honestly didn’t know what to say to her, so I just replied as simply as could in a hesitant voice. “That is a question that I can not answer you. You will have to ask a Hogwarts Professor.”
Again without missing a beat she replied, “I want to send a letter to Professor Snape, because he is your favorite.” Again I didn’t want to ruin her hope so I agreed to let her do it, and after she was done writing it I sat for days trying to figure out what to do with her letter until I finally decided to send it off to Professor Snape himself (Alan Rickman) with a letter of my own explaining her letter.
I never in my life believed that my little sister and myself would receive a reply from him, and when months went by without hearing any word I officially gave up all hope, but one day out of the blue a letter came to us from England from Professor Snape himself.
To say that I was shocked is a complete understatement, because what I felt as my shaky hands tightly grasped ahold of that little piece of paper was a feeling so completely far away from shocked then anyone could possibly imagine. I was paralyzed in an emotion that I’ve never felt before in my life, and the feeling was so strong that I literally fell onto the floor because my legs were so weak they couldn’t hold my body weight in an upright position.
It was on the hard cold floor that I read his reply in a shaky voice to my mom and my little sister, and it was also on the floor where I sat for several hours bawling my eyes out. But this my dear readers is not where my tale ends, because I still have much more to say.
You see, at that point in time the letter that I got meant the world to me, but it wasn’t until January, 2016, when I finally realized just how special our interaction with ‘Professor Snape’ through a letter was for both Alan Rickman and myself. Around the time that he received our letter and sent his own he was sadly already dying from cancer, a fact that absolutely no one knew about but his family. By the time the letter he sent reached me he didn’t have that much longer to live, but that fact doesn’t make me sad. It actually makes smile because I know for an absolute fact that my little sister’s letter reached him when I believed he needed it the most.
We truly made him feel carefree, feel whole, for a short period of time, and that, my dear fellow readers, is the most beautiful and purest magic of all. So to reach my conclusion, my fellow Potterheads, magic does exist. Maybe not in the way that we would want it to, but it is still there waiting to come out at the absolute right time. Mine just happened to come from a short letter that consisted of three sentences. Where do you think yours will come from?
-H.L.
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