The Fictional Places We’d Love to Call Home

Harry Potter

J.K. Rowling

For my friends, this choice may not be much of a surprise. They are either far too familiar with myaffinity for the Potterworld or they share it. For those who don’t know me very well, however, it might be unexpected for me to want to live in Harry’s world. I don’t have the excuse that some of the other contributors have; I cannot say that “as a kid” I loved Rowling’s world because, as a kid, that world had yet to be written.

I came to Hogwarts, so to speak, far later in life. But, when I traveled, vicariously, in that small boat on the black lake along side Harry, I was transfixed. Before me was a gleaming, towering silhouette of Hogwarts Castle, the moonlight glittered against the calm waves of the lake so that the windows shone like diamonds. I, like many millions, ran through the castle corridors avoiding Filch under my father’s invisibility cloak. I sneaked into Honeyduke’s beneath a secret passage to smell thick, honey-colored toffee, chocolate frogs and Sugar Quills. I rode astride a Thestral, chilled by the London fog, in the hopes that my efforts would save my godfather.

I walked, fear tightening my gut, into the darkness of the Forbidden Forest with my dead parents and loved ones as my personal entourage of the dead, to my doom, bent on facing my enemy.

I did all these things, felt all these emotions, raged, laughed and cried right alongside Harry as he did them, felt them because it is more than just a magical world. Besides, really, who wouldn’t want to live there?

~T.S. Tate