Hogwarts, A Destiny

So there I was on the morning of my eleventh birthday, sitting on a trunk on the front stoop of my house, holding a plate of dead mice, wearing my sister’s skateboard helmet, and flaunting a yellow sock on one foot and a burgundy sock on the other. It was almost noon, August sun in full blaze. I had been sitting there since 8:00am. The mice were beginning to smell and my head was dripping under the helmet.

But I wasn’t moving. Today was the day I had been awaiting for three years ever since my Weird Aunt Marge, handed me my destiny in the form of a late birthday present. “Really, a book?” I thought, but said, “Thank you” instead with the fake smile I had perfected specifically for receiving her gifts. Weird Aunt Marge only winked, and from that day on, she was no longer Weird Aunt Marge. She was my Weird-Destiny-Giving Aunt Marge, because the book she had given me was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

So I knew what turning eleven meant—acceptance letter to Hogwarts. I had mice for the delivery owl. I had on a helmet, ready to jump into Hagrid’s flying motorcycle. I had on my Gryffindor-colored socks, because that was totally the house I was going to be placed in. I had my trunk packed with all necessary belongings like sturdy shoes for running through the forest with Harry to attack Voldemort, more yellow and burgundy socks, an outfit for Dobby, and a fake ID made out of construction paper and my yearbook picture so I could buy Butterbeer.

But we all know how this story ends.

The letter never arrived. Hagrid never showed up. My mother came home, shrieked, and tossed the mice into the backfield with that look saying, “Did this child really slid out of my uterus?”

As for me, you know that distant high-pitched ringing you sometimes hear in your ears? That is the sound of my eleven-year-old birthday tantrum still reverberating throughout the universe. The clock struck midnight and my soaring expectations were crushed by a bludger of despair, hurling me into a cauldron of broken dreams.

But I remembered Dumbledore’s words to Harry, “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” So I lived… with a plan. My cousin Val, Weird-Destiny-Giving Aunt Marge’s daughter Val, was doing this cool thing called study abroad, which meant that she got to spend her junior year of college anywhere in the world. So I bided my time. I bided my time for ten years until I myself was a junior in college, and I registered to study abroad in the UK, the land of Hogwarts, at the University of Birmingham.

Only I never arrived at the University of Birmingham. If you have read this blog closely, you will have noticed that I have never once written of attending class. No. Because I have been searching, searching the UK for my destiny, searching for Hogwarts. After seven months, I have narrowed its location to the northeastern quadrant of Scotland, and from there is where I write, searching, ever hopeful, hearing J. K. Rowling’s words echoing off the ancient hills, confirming what I always knew sitting on the stoop that hot August day, “We all have magic inside us.”