What he didn't anticipate, was that I'd expect to be whipped off to Hogwarts by Hagrid any day (because in the book, magical children get whipped off to magic school at age 11). I kept this expectation very secret, because I felt that if I said it out loud, it may not happen.
Hope lives eternal in the fiction-obsessed heart.
I waited and waited, waking up every day thinking, "THIS is the day I go to Hogwarts, surely!".
By the time my 12th birthday rolled around, I had wound myself up into an excited frenzy. Sure, the book said you go to witch school at 11, but it's just a book. I mean, it could be 12, they don't know!
What was my awesome present for my 12th birthday? A stamp-book. As in, a book where you can place the stamps you collect.
WTF? I hated stamps! No, I didn't even care about them enough to hate them, they were just the useless things you put on letters! And now I had an ALBUM to put STAMPS in?
Words cannot express how deflated I felt. Like, imagine waking up on Christmas Day to find that, SURPRISE! It's really National Anthem Day (or some other crap nobody cares about) instead.
Still, I soldiered on. My thirteenth, birthday! That would be it for sure! It made more sense anyway, you know, the first year of 'teenageness'. 11 and 12 didn't seem that likely, now that I thought about it. They were quite arbitary. Thirteen, on the other hand... well, it just made sense.
M thirteenth birthday came and went, without so much as a flicker of magical ability. How I tried to move things with my mind.. to no avail.
Well, thirteen was a bit young to learn magic anyway. How could thirteen year olds handle the responsibility? They couldn't. It must be 14.
At 14, my parents decided to move to Australia.
Aha! This was it! Obviously, India didn't have a Hogwarts branch, and we were moving closer to the school!
Eventually, my dreams died a slow and silent death. By the time I was 15, I stopped thinking about it. I had even forgotten I used to harbour this fantasy. I guess I had repressed the memory for fear of spiraling into depression.
My heart still aches when I think about the missed opportunity. Maybe the letter was lost in the mail. Hogwarts wouldn't bother following it up, because hey, I'm not Harry freakin' Potter, I have no scar, my parents are alive and well (god damn it!). I probably just faded into obscurity.
Dumbledore forgot I existed
And now he's dead. :(
Is it really so wrong to want to be a part of this?
