I Need Magic

I don’t want magic to be real.

I need it to be.

The eking grey of the world around me edges in until it becomes the ink seeping into my veins.

That blood that I pour onto the page in hopes of calling forth the magic I can’t find elsewhere. I need it to come to life. I need to see the glimmer manifest before my eyes.

When I look inward, searching for that light and finding nothing, it feels like I’m dying. I think I’m crying for a moment, but my eyes have long gone dry.

It’s the suffocation I’m feeling. Unable to breath in this world that doesn’t support life. That doesn’t want me. These walls press in upon me like a closing tomb, but I’m too afraid to leave. My prison is my comfort and I am more afraid of the price of freedom than I am of what I lose by not trying to leave again.

Besides, I could fade away, vanish, and the world would be no worse off.

These were my thoughts that night as I crumpled to the floor under the weight of all my failure and insecurity. It was the night I first heard the pages whisper.

They didn’t make words. Not in any language I could ever think to translate. I was confused and terrified at first. I thought maybe I’d finally broken, finally gone insane. I thought that perhaps the icy wraiths whose skeletal fingers I would feel scrap across the inside of my lonely, aching chest had finally come to claim me for good.

With that thought I smiled for the first time in ages. It was finally over. I wouldn’t hurt anymore.

But then the eerie archaic gibberish coalesced into thoughts that I could understand. I understood that this was an ancient conversation I was being allowed to hear. It was something far greater than me, or my thoughts, or my problems. But I was being allowed to hear it at last, and once I understood this, I wept.

What I could gather, what little bit of it I can translate into words is this.

There was. This is. Creation was and is again. It is all around me and I can be its conduit if I choose. Choose to be strong. Choose to be wise. Choose to be.

I chose to be.

And the room filled with the whispers and their possibility until every molecule vibrated and pulsed against one another and the air hummed with the promise of what could be.

I awoke the next morning with my notebook clutched to my chest. Light filtered through the thin beige curtains, alive with the thousands of particles of dust floating through the beams and into the invisible aether that exists in the endless realm of what we are unable to see.

Certain that I had awoken from a surreal dream, I thumbed through the familiar poems of my recent thoughts. Tally marks of the malaise I was certain was my destiny. The familiar lyrics gave way to strange syllables and alien gatherings of letters. In them I found a cadence, a rhythm as natural as my own heartbeat. Although I did not understand their meaning, as I read them it seemed that I could feel the pulse of the Earth, of the universe itself.

I feared to speak the words aloud lest I unzip the double helix of reality and set forth something immense upon this world that could never be recalled again. I closed the book and went to work, doing something I cared nothing about the entire day. I made sure I did it well enough to keep my overseers appeased and quietly returned home to stare at these pages over a lukewarm cup of coffee.

The words made less sense than they had that morning. Instead of secret code, they just looked like the mindless scribbling of a confused child. The cadence was less familiar. The power of the message was fading. I was losing my chance.

I was terrified of what I might unleash upon the world. In the end, I think I was more afraid of facing a tomorrow as bleak as yesterday. So I sat down and began to read the words aloud.

My apartment began to shake. The air thrummed with some invisible, living force. I held out my hand and unseen pens inked the air around my forearm with swirls and unknown symbols. I pushed my hand forward and the wall erupted into fragments of plaster, wood and glass that sprayed out into the parking lot. I looked on in horror as the debris showered the cars below.

I thought about repairing the wall, seeing if the magic could undo what it had just done. But I stopped myself. The wall was gone and now I had no reason to stay here any longer.