Saying Goodbye

(Written in 2003.)

"Why do you weep? All of these tears upon your face..."

Heh, it's a funny thing, I don't really know.

As I write this, it's very nearly the fourth of December (I keep late hours). It's very nearly all...finished. And I cannot believe it.

It's a funny thing, really, it is. If you asked me three years ago what I thought I'd be doing by the time the movie trilogy had come to the end, I don't know if I'd have answered what I would now -- if I'd known how it would have felt at the time. I've been following this damn movie trilogy for over three years now. This all started when I was in my mid-teens, and I'm hurtling towards my first goddamn step out of them now.

It's finishing.

That thought makes me feel so many things...chiefly, sad.

Yes, I'll damn well admit it. The thought that after this Christmas, there will be no new movie waiting for me, no soul-stirring soundtrack, no characters...no, friends, waiting for me, allowing me to step into a completely unreal world for three hours, to just suspend what I'm told to believe for three hours...that thought makes me choke up.

In the beginning, this was all just a movie. Now...now it's something else entirely.

Before I first saw The Fellowship of the Ring, I was so frightened that seeing these characters I'd loved for so long alive, moving up there on the silver screen would do me in completely. It nearly did. I was scared that things would be wrong, scared that things would be right. And they were wrong, and were right. It was good and bad and wonderful and the response left me breatheless.

Frodo, my beloved Frodo...he was real. And it was like he had stepped into my life for the first time...only this time, so unbelievably real. And now it feels as if he'll sail away out of it once again. The Grey Havens in the book destroyed me. Watching that scene before my eyes, in a bubble of unreal reality...that won't just make me sad, it will make me cry.

I'm not a girl who cries easily.

I guess what I want to say is...this is a book I love. These movies are based upon this book, and these movies twined into the most important years of my life. I love them. Mr. Peter Jackson, if you ever read this...thank you. I know I bitched and complained and still am, to this day, a damned book purist, but thank you.

I'll miss this so much.

"And all will turn to silver glass...the light on the water...grey ships pass into the West."