Atomic pottery

To start, it was a great day. Rain flew down copper gutters melodically, shading the cold winter sun with popping layers of tunes. Chocolate was perfect too: hot enough to warm his fingers but not to burn his throat. His smile went back to a distant time, when school was in the imminent future and job was just something to blame for an adult's absence.

He opened Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at page one and started reading. It was a worn, old, paper copy of the book. He didn't simply loved Harry Potter and its universe: it was the lens that allowed him to see, and understand, the world. Long ago he had decided that magic and wizards were not real, yet he was equally sure that it was the Harry Potter's books, rather than his parents, to have raised him.

Canonic books were all he needed. In the past, he had read and made his own fanfictions, but the original story held any topic so perfectly that reading fanfics was unpalatable to him: changes were reducing content rather than expanding it. Harry Potter had the exact number of words to be perfect: there were no erotic fantasies that could explore the fragile structures drawn by the story's dynamics without shattering them.

Indivisible, unique, unchangeble: to him, the wizard's books were the founding atom of perceived life. In fact, he had little or no interest for anything else, yet everything mattered because everything was in the book: he would have liked to shut doors over the mundane world and dedicate himself to Harry, but he knew the importance of lived life because of him. Meeting and loving people, fighting our inner sins, sharing the good and bad outcomes of the lived life, discovering braveness in daily actions: all the unimportant things compared to the books and the pleasure of reading them, were in fact essentials because Harry's books, the codes of perceived life, said that and proved it.

The mirror of Erised was not flat indeed: it was a box of mirrors and the mirror itself was the book. Reflecting itself in itself, it described life by being it; and existing in it, it allowed to be described in it, building reality over itself.

Alone, comfortably sitting in his IKEA chair and drinking hot chocolate during a storm, he turned another page, loosing himself into a book.