Today I realized that another birthday has come and gone, and I am grieved to report that my Hogwarts acceptance letter has still failed to arrive. I am nineteen years old now and have been anxiously scanning the horizon daily for owl postage for about seven years, but I’m afraid my hope is beginning to dwindle.
When my Hogwarts owl didn’t arrive on my eleventh birthday as planned, I was certain there had been some sort of mix up. My life’s ambitions at this time did, after all, involve working a steady job at the Ministry of Magic and purchasing a comfortable home in Hogsmeade with my lovely wizarding family. My hope was not extinguished, however, and I was forgiving of the school’s rather rude delay. Another year passed, and I, under the impression that I had been weight-listed to the class of 2010, waited in eager expectation of my fateful next birthday.
But my twelfth year came and went, and still Hogwarts failed to contact me. At this point I was excusing their delay with an inconvenient mix-up in the postal system. Owls, though intelligent, are really no match for the complex layout of Seattle, after all. Especially, European-born owls. So I waited patiently, graciously allowing the owls time to recoup and gather their bearings in the foreign city before successfully delivering me the letter I was sure they held.
After several years of waiting in this fashion, however, I could no longer excuse the owls’ delay. I was now 16 years old, an age almost unheard for a first year at Hogwarts. But I was still determined. There were other explanations for the setback, of course. My last name, for instance, is spelled with an “A”, but pronounce with a distinct “I” sound- a simple flaw that could easily lead to a holdup in finding my location. Or perhaps dark wizards were monitoring my house and intercepting all attempts at contact. Or maybe my parents (being the embittered muggles that they are) were stashing my letters away, but Hogwarts, too busy recruiting other students, had failed to notice my absence on the school train. Anything was possible, really....
But this year, after yet another owl-free birthday and a wizard-less trip to London, my hope is finally running dry.
You see, I am starting to fear that I might actually not be a wizard. After all, I am now nineteen years old and can do little more than feebly levitate a few inches off the ground and willfully ripen fruit with my mind- mere cheap tricks in the wizarding world. I have done everything to attract the attention of the Hogwarts headmaster, but whether I was proudly sporting wizard’s attire, yelling “Voldemort” at the top of my lungs (in order to attract Death Eaters by my audacious disrespect to their taboo), tapping random bricks on city walls with my homemade wand, jumping vainly into fireplaces with makeshift floo powder, or even attempting to transfigure myself into a cat, my efforts have gone unnoticed. I am starting to run out of options, and I fear that I may never make contact with my wizarding brethren.
I am starting to think that I may be doomed to live out the rest of my existence as a misunderstood muggle... alone... rejected by my inferior muggle-peers and cast off by the wizarding world that didn’t want me. I may still be filled with excitement every time I see an owl fly overhead, and I may still occasionally find myself waving sticks on the ground in hopes of inadvertently casting a spell, but for the time being, I am reserved to my fate.
It looks like I may be a muggle, after all.
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