Wizards are Unnecessarily Complicated Solo

September 1, 2025

I stick my head out the train window as I wave goodbye to my mother. This isn't the train that's going to take me to Hogwarts, the wizarding school, merely a train that will take me to London.
The train ride is fairly uneventful. I’m blessed with the beauty of a window seat, allowing me to gaze at the green, wet, countryside as it flies by faster than ever before. The unusually humid weather prompted me to wear denim shorts instead of regular jeans, but my baggy purple hoodie still felt like home.
I don’t know what I’m going to do in this new, magical place. I don’t know anything here, and I knew everything at home. My mind wanders to the long slender box in my trunk and a wise old voice whispering in my ear.
“Chestnut wood and Phoenix feather. Reliable, and loyal. A wand that will serve you through thick and thin.”
There is one other person near me, in the seat beside the aisle. A girl who looks a little older, with dark hair and bright eyes. She looks relaxed and on edge at the same time, with her leg bouncing and her eyes glued to a book. The same one I happen to be reading now.
After the novelty of the countryside wears off, I pull out my book and read away my worries. Far too soon, an announcement is made telling me that we’re at King’s Cross Station.
The girl beside me stands up too, and I follow her outside. After retrieving my trunk and lugging it over to platform nine, I stand puzzled because there’s nine and there’s ten, but no nine and three quarters. Leave it to the wizards to make it unnecessarily complicated.
The train station is overwhelming, filled with smoke and shouts and the heavy thrum of the trains, so different from the quiet wood I would be in right now if it weren’t for this school. In the midst of it all I somehow spot the same girl from the train, glancing around with a paranoid expression, hands tight around a trunk similar to mine.
I pause in the middle of the walkway, getting banged into by several angry men before I manage to maneuver my trunk to the edge. I am rewarded though, as I see the girl glance surreptitiously around once more before disappearing into a column.
Somehow I’m not surprised.
I follow her steps until I find myself near the same column. I reach out tentatively, and draw my hand back in shock as I meet no resistance. Nervously, I step into the column to find a whole new world.
It comes in flashes. Sunlight streaming through dusty windows set in high arches. A gleaming red train emitting almost sweet smelling smoke, different from the acrid tang of before. And the people! What could only be described as witches and wizards, darting around, many in the same robe-like garb from Diagon Alley. Cages filled with owls or cats or the occasional toad, and perhaps most reassuringly, a gleaming bronze sign telling me that I have found the correct place.
Wizard-land, or whatever else I’m supposed to call it. With a sigh of relief, I make my way over towards the scarlet engine marked “Hogwarts Express”.