fear, freeagency and the future

The doors have opened. 
The Grand Councilor takes you by the hand and leads you down the velvet red spiral of stairs, down from your home into a strange place, a strange land. 
It's not what you were expecting, despite the rumors, and you want to run, you want to return home. 
This place isn't like your home at all; assemblies of faces you don't remember look down at you, though you came from higher then the sky. 

The sky. All you can remember is sky; everything now is cloudy, fogs of fresh experience woven with mists of forgotten memories. 

The lights are bright here; not the brightest you've seen, but of course your eyes are different now: to them, the light is only pain. 

And voices. The air--so cold, who knew there existed such a cold?--is filled with voices you cannot name, names if you knew you could not speak.
Help! you want to cry, but all you utter is a helpless sound; a child's sob, a nervous, fearful disaster of emotion.
Where is your father? He would know what to do.

This May Sound Crazy

but it's the Truth. Capital T.
When I was a little girl (about nine  to eleven-ish), I was obsessed with the world of J.K. Rowling. Obsessed. Or perhaps the right word has a closer connection with confused. Externally, I denied affiliation with any sort of fanhood related to Harry Potter, but internally, I desperately wanted this childish fantasy to be reality. I wanted it all to be true; I wanted witches and wizards and broomsticks and wands. Most of all, I wanted magic. I wanted to say Wingardium Leviosa and have a feather float through the air as a result of it.
For some reason, in my nine-ish-year-old mind, this desire transformed itself into a desire to be an actress in the Harry Potter movies. You see, I had the thought that if one were to act in these movies, the world of Harry Potter would, at least for the time that one was on set, feel completely real. (It didn't occur to me that being a Harry Potter character would probably take away the magical otherworldliness of it, since it would inevitably be part of my world.)
Of course, seeing as I never told anyone about this fantasy, it hardly had the opportunity to fulfill itself in reality, and thus, over the course of months and years, my hypothetical Harry Potter career faded to nothing.
It's like that saying about the tree falling in a forest; if no one heard it fall, who's to say it did?
Well, now you've heard my tree falling.
Don't you dare laugh.