Ravenclaw For Life

I want to write a thousand stories. Not just with words and letters, but with my fingertips, with the soles of my feet, with my breath in cold air and warm kitchens. Stories are everything. Every part of us is a story. Maybe most of them float off, but that's okay. We don't need to catch them in nets or bottles like the BFG catching dreams, and that's one great thing about them. That they're there and emanating from us, from our very existence, whether or not we can talk or write or see, we are stories. Endless and curling stories. Forever.

We write stories about ourselves when we self-assign personality types or traits or labels. Myers-Briggs and horoscopes and blood types and which kind of dog we'd be. Harry Potter houses (I'm a Ravenclaw for life), the factions in the Divergent series (I can't decide on one, they're all too stark, but maybe Amity). I remember drawing myself when I was little, trying to get it to look right, but I think I cared more about whether it looked like who I felt I was. I remember having toy I.D. cards as a kid, one saying I was an alien investigator or something, one saying I was a secret agent, one for a dog. I loved them. I loved the concept of an I.D. card. Something to record the truth in bullet points of who I am, or an exciting lie. Now that I have real I.D. cards I don't find them so fascinating, but I still like the way they tell their stories about me.

I used to keep a box for magical studies, when I was growing up wishing I could go to Hogwarts. I had a wand in there, with the tip attached to elastic inside so it could come off, I kept an astrology book in there, and I think possibly some forged magic schoolbooks. I was prepared to be a witch. I was ready. And even though my Hogwarts letter never came, it didn't matter. Witch and Ravenclaw became parts of my identity through perseverance of imagination. No matter what or where I am, I'll always be a Ravenclaw.