Welcome one and all to my newest fanfiction! Yeah, a Harry Potter fanfiction alright, and no worries, this is a really sporadic post and I won't be giving up on my Naruto story at all. One day (a few days ago) I was clearing out old files on my computer and I found this. Within half an hour I had it polished up and couldn't resist posting it. This story will be updated less frequently than my Naruto story, and like my Naruto story it's a very iffy-updating system until the summer. No joke, blame school. I'm constantly swamped.

Anyway, so this is my newest Harry Potter fanfiction, and the only one I've ever posted on here. I hope you guys like it so far! I always like to hear your predictions of what you think will happen next, too!

~Mari

Call me paranoid, but I'm sure there are many others like me.

Those of us who have read books or watched movies that left us wishing… left us hoping even if the rational parts of our minds agreed that believing was stupid… that our dreams were impossible.

Regardless, there are those of us that smile at the invisible things, stop in the middle of our rooms and look out our windows, waiting, hoping, wishing that perhaps if we can't see our dreams, those amazing people in them can see us…

I'm here to tell you not to give up. Why? Simply because I'm one of those paranoid people that can't help but think the invisible is there and that the wool is either being pulled over my eyes or at least somewhere, in some alternate universe, my dreams might JUST be true.

I'm also here to tell you… how my dream really did come true… and that the feeling you get when you're walking down the streets of London past a certain brick wall of being idly watched isn't just your hopes fabricating falsities in your head. Of course, I always knew there was more than one place that this happened. The unexplainable things always happened around me and I can't quite say why. I'm a rather normal person, if I can take the liberty of saying what normal really is, and I haven't done anything particularly extraordinary in my life.

This brick wall first came to the forefront of my mind after I finished a particularly fascinating book series that goes by the name of Harry Potter. This "Harry Potter" would also be the main character, a mistreated boy with dead parents who lives with his abusive uncle, aunt, and cousin. Upon his eleventh birthday he would be swept away on an adventure to a magical land living in harmony with the "muggle" world – or the world of non-magical people. He was a wizard and was formally invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Parallel to the plot, I awaited my eleventh birthday as Harry might have if he had known of that magical world; I simply couldn't wait. Being born in December I was a little worried about how I could be accepted to Hogwarts. Would I wait until the school year began again or would I receive my letter on my birthday? When the letter didn't arrive I wasn't too worried.

'It'll come in the summer,' I thought. My being a kid, my parents understood my wish for adventure. They didn't stop me… or couldn't really. They tried to tell me nothing would happen, that witches, wizards, centaurs, dark lords, goblins and the like didn't exist. I thought, 'surely they must! How else could people have come up with them?' But the summer came and went and I was once more shipped off to my normal muggle school with normal muggle subjects, learning normal muggle things. When I arrived home on the first day and my mother asked me how school was I ran to my room and cried. Such is the result of dreams being crushed.

Over the years I've gotten over it. I've kept my head buried in books, determined that if I wasn't able to live those adventurous, magical lives, that I would get as close to them as possible. I read of flocks of flying kids, sparkling vampires, fourteen-year-old British spies, and cats that lived in clans and had lives perhaps as realistically dramatic as those of our own. I poured over book after book, took to writing my own fan-based stories. Literature had become a part of me and me a part of it. I could live my dreams out on paper while appeasing my parents in their thoughts of more plausible and realistic goals: going to college, becoming a doctor, marrying and having their grandchildren.

Luckily I'm still twelve and all of that is rather far off. Quite frankly I have no interest in those last two goals and can settle for the former pair. College and the field of medicine sound reasonable for a normal, unexciting girl like me. I'd be smart, help people, and live a healthy, average life before dying and doing whatever comes after death if anything at all. Such was the way of the world and I'd come to accept that. However… it never stopped me from indulging myself in those little fantasies.

I make a point of stargazing every night. I point out all of the constellations, the named stars that I can see by the city lights. I've been fortunate to even see six of the Seven Sisters – a group of stars named from Greek mythology and possibly one of my favorite groupings of stars. As I looked at these stars from my bedroom window or my back yard I liked to fancy that I wasn't the only one looking at them… or rather that my favorite characters from certain series or books are looking at them, thinking the same things I was.

My indulgences in my day-dreams were small. Smiling to myself knowingly as though someone were there, like I knew something they didn't expect. Looking at the plain, ordinary things with a range of expressions that suggest they're something they really aren't, is common. I had taken to talking to myself on numerous occasions, pondering out loud really. Not necessarily in the manner of pretending someone were listening, but more in the manner of a girl who needs someone to listen and only has herself to talk to, sounding her ideas out loud in hopes that she can pass a good enough judgment on her own words. I did little things, seemingly normal things, or perhaps things merely normal for me. No one questioned them and maybe they didn't even notice. I was fine with it, I didn't really care. I supposed it was just my way of sending out some kind of signal, like those alien apocalypse movies sending warnings of impending doom through radio waves and such… except I never planned on destroying any planets or eating brains any time soon. I just wanted my wishes to know, in the case that they really did exist, that there is one girl who could believe without seeing… and who respected the fact that she couldn't do anything about it enough to leave them alone.

The prime example of this was that brick wall. It left a strange feeling in me, one that sent tingles up my spine, a feeling of strange breathlessness. I forced myself to look at it in passing like everyone else. I was afraid, quite honestly, of this feeling. I was so very afraid that I was getting too involved in my day dreaming. I knew what it felt like to put too much hope into a dream coming true and I never wanted to feel it again. That brick wall caused an internal war in me. From behind it adventure started, but I forced myself to suppress that feeling. No, it was just a normal brick wall. If I walked at it I would only hit my head and look like a moron… I could settle with the fact that I was normal. I wasn't entitled to adventure. My parents were normal, my ancestors were boringly normal, and my life was probably one of the most dreadfully, averagely, mind-bogglingly normal lives anyone had ever lived. Some other kid could walk through that wall. I wasn't invited to and I knew that if I tried… my dreams might cease to exist. By bottling that wall up and setting it into the far corners of my mind I would preserve the belief that anything was possible.

Every day I passed that wall on my way to and from school. Admittedly it was the only thing I refused to give those private looks to with a vengeance. I never smiled knowingly… or even smiled at all. My refusal to give up my dreams was a serious and real as that feeling I got every time I approached that stretch of sidewalk. I would look in the windows of the store to either side of it, but never would I glance at that wall in more than a passing gesture. I was to remain normal because that was my destiny. Fate had made its mark, in my mind, on the very day I didn't receive my letter to that wizarding school.

Long gone were my days of actively searching my mom's garden for gnomes and my closet for fairies. I no longer picked up twigs, waving them like wands and giggling as I casted spells on my friends. I didn't jump off swings, trying to fly or even dress up for Halloween. I hadn't, however, quite given up belief that those things could be real. Not yet.

It's a good thing too. For if I had, I never would have done what I did that day…

The day that all my dreams came true…

Heh, or maybe just one of them~