Muggle

Muggle

Awel

You hide the world from us. We are the innocents you shelter from reality; we are children, naïve and stubborn and prone to causing trouble. Let us alone and we'll blow up the world.

We are the ones you watch with suspicion--your cab driver or train conductor; the waiter at the coffee shop, the voices your son or daughter listens to guiltily on late-night radio. We are the curiosities of the day, the amusement of your intellectuals. We are specimens, subject to experiments but never to interviews.

You take away our children and send them back summer after summer changed. They're your children now, in your world. They are here to tell us in exacting detail what is wrong with our society and what we should do about it. But still, you protest, the two peoples can coexist. It is not a war. It is not a war until you lose a child.

You come to our door and say it was an unfortunate accident. You provide us with gold, knowing we will never be able to seek justice in your world--or is it just to shut us up? All you want is silence. No one in our world or yours must know.

But it doesn't matter, it turns out, because no one in your world is interested by a lonely girl with an unresolved death. And in our world, she is lost amid thousands of lives entrenched in war. Later we tell the curious that she died in the blitz. There is sympathy and nodding of heads and a sense of shared pain. And then: Isn't it terrible, my husband's office building was bombed too. We know it was you who reduced her to the level of a burnt-out building, you who covered her in fog and flowers, held our hand and told us lies.

We are what you fear most. We are the people you avoid in the street. We spread tales of the worst sort about you; we plot against you, we know your secrets. We know of the spells you cast to alter the mind and the torture you inflict upon your own kind at the island prison of Azkaban. We will fight you every way we know how. We are Muggles, Mudbloods, half-witted and slow, self-centered and destructive. We are tired of disappearances and unexplained deaths and a way of life that is designed to fight ours.

We are the ones whose memories you cleanse because you fear us. We are the ones who trusted you with our daughter, who fit into neither our world nor yours. We know why she died. You came to us once, one of you, the only one with the courage to face us in some last gesture of generosity before you disappeared from our lives forever. We sat in our parlor while Albus Dumbledore told us that our child was killed because of our blood that she carried.

In your battles we are the ones who die. Your two sides are not so different. One says we are an infestation; the other calls us children that need to be protected. Both of you fear us more than anything. For we are the passersby in your life; we are your neighbors and we build your towns. You scorn our puny achievements, our art and our writing and our music and our inventions and our homes and our lives. We know nothing. We know everything.

We are your worst fears. Always strangers, never equals. We wait until we can rise against you. We are guilty of arrogance, of denseness, of imperfection. We are the parents of a dead child. We are what is left.

And yet it is not a war, you say. Can you blame us?

Were you never one of us?