This week I got talking to Alison, she's from Georgia and I've known her nearly 4 years now (she's 15) but yeah, she's one of the 'americans' who form the group of us that lived in and loved the site X_HogwartsSchool_X, a Harry Potter forum.
It was probably our obsession for about 2 years straight, we all stayed up all night when the new books came out, we had regular msn mass conversation with much craziness and things like that. We all had nicknames based on characters from the books, so hehe, I was Remmy (Remus) and we had Hermy (hermione), Siri (guess that one), Sevvie (snape) etc... anyway, after I hit my GCSE's I got busier, and after that I couldn't talk so much. I'd still post on the forum but I could feel it getting quieter. One day Sev told us all she was leaving for a few months, She lived in India and her dad moved about a lot. But we didn't hear from her until a year later, and when she signed into msn it was her mother.
The last time I heard from her personally was on her deviantart account, but all the same it was a long long time ago. In the meanwhile, fights broke out among us, some of the less regular members to the place decided to make their own forum, and of course, our admin Hermy, being the posessive type, didn't like this one bit. The group ended up splitting into two factions, Hermy and her followers, and the 'rebels' - these groups were subject to change at any time depending on who she favoured (apparently) but nobody knew what was going on, nobody knew who's side they were on or who was on which side and it was all very confusing. This all happened behind my back - I had fallen out of contact with them all over this time, occasionally talking to Alison. She told me every time things were /bad/ and after telling me exactly why, I proceeded to ignore it because I thought, well. Things will sort themselves out. We're all good friends here aren't we?Wrong.Last week I messaged Alison again to check upon how things are doing and discovered that Hermy no longer messages or speaks to anyone, not ever via email. If and when she does, she's very rude and very short with them. I'd noticed things on the actual forum were pretty dire but I hadn't imagined things could ever get this bad. I guess after being left to fester it had just grown and grown.
Siri never contacted anyone, she was getting on with 'real life' (wants to get into the ivies, very clever girl indeed). Alison didn't really know what to do about it all, so after making sure she was ok I proceeded to message Siri. Thankfully I got a reply, and we got talking. After a while she came to the conclusion (and I very much agreed with this) that we were going to drift apart no matter what happened, because the only thing we'd ever had in common was Harry Potter, and after we'd all grown out of it, what was left to hold us together? Jack all - we didn't even know each other's proper names. Well, I did vaguely remember after the first introductions, but you get names wrong after 4 years don't you? After being so close it felt like it had all never happened, we were just a group of strangers scattered across opposite sides of the Atlantic.
And we were growing up - next year would be final finals for two members, and I'd be shipping off to university. Still, I'm going to stay in touch as long as I can with Alison and 'Siri' (can't remember her name anymore) - they're still good friends and we do have things to talk about. It's like meeting people for the first time though, and I think this has to be my strangest, most difficult friendship ever.
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