Always.

Throughout the last few weeks of reading the Deathly Hallows I kept thinking about the summer of ‘07, and I know many of you may be asking “why”, but some of you remember that summer as the end of a generation.  July 21st, 2007 was the accumulation of years of midnight-lines, speculation on Snape’s loyalties, and, with the success of movies, a media blitz the likes of which had never been seen; when I picked up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone at a Scholastic event in 2nd grade I had no idea what I was getting into.  The summer was full of long talks with friends about what they expected from the final book, with cutouts of Snape peering out at you from behind bookshelves in the mall with captions reading “Severus Snape: Friend or Foe?” in eerie scripts.  It was a bonding point between my best friends, and we were first in line that July night to celebrate with the rest of our extended HP-family.

With these emotions on my mind I turned the last page of Nineteen Years Later and closed the book.  Snape’s final act read like that of a Shakespearean tragedy, and it was the nuances of his story that stay fresh on my mind 6 years later.  Snape is transformed the bat-like man who we were sure was trying to kill Harry in the first book to the weak/sobbing man begging for the help from Dumbledore to save him in the last.  This Pensieve scene in particular brings a knock-you-on-your-ass realization to the reader, aided by the vividness in which Rowling delves into it.  Upon learning that Harry must die, “Snape looked horrified.”  Can this really be the same man that we all hated a mere 100 pages prior?  The series ended on a higher note than any of us expected, despite several loved characters dying, and was a worthy conclusion to the books that came before it.  The once-believed nemesis of Harry, Snape ,went from hated to revered, and it all hinged on a single word uttered in the Pensieve that would stick with the reader for the rest of their lives; “Always.”