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Meet the author of this submission:
When I was ten, nothing in my real world mattered as much as a battered paperback hidden under my pillow. It had a lightning bolt on the cover and a title that hummed with magic: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
I wasn't just a reader — I was a believer. Every night, after my parents turned off the lights, I would slip out my worn copy and dive into Platform 9¾. I could taste the sugary fizz of Butterbeer, feel the draft of the Moving Staircases, and hear the whisper of the Sorting Hat in my own skull. I practiced waving a chopstick, whispering "Wingardium Leviosa" at my pencil case, willing it to float. It never did — but my heart soared anyway.
What obsessed me wasn't just the spells or quidditch. It was the longing. Harry was lonely, awkward, and overlooked — just like I sometimes felt in my own classroom. Yet in Hogwarts, he found friends who chose him, a home that claimed him, and a courage that wasn't about being fearless, but about standing up when he was terrified.
I read the first four books so many times that my copy fell apart — pages loose, spine cracked, cover taped with masking tape. I didn't mind. To me, those loose pages were like Portkeys: touch one, and I was gone.
Now, at sixteen, I know that owls don't deliver letters and wands don't choose wizards. But I also know this: that obsession taught me to look for magic in ordinary places — in a library's quiet hush, in a friend's unexpected kindness, in the first sentence of a book that still makes my pulse quicken.
Harry never came to take me to Hogwarts. But he gave me something better: the key to every world I'll ever want to enter — one page at a time.
