I sometimes wonder if spectacular is possible.
I don’t think I’m a cynic, or even a realist. Simply a worrier.
Remember when magic was possible? Not even possible, but known, it was around us, it was always hiding just behind our line of sight. As a kid, I was always on the verge of discovering a secret alcove with fallen columns, covered in moss, dust dancing and swirling and catching the light. A place untouched for centuries, just existing, breathing, and all of nature grew from here. All roots and streams and leaves called this place home, and every breeze that ever blew started from the ancient keystone-adorned arches that were placed sporadically through the growth, still standing from the church that was once there. Forever ago, before I had found this place, before my parent s were born or divorced or before their parents were born and divorced, people worshipped there. Not gods or figments, but real life miracle-makers and magic-users and could be taught simple spells: levitation and telepathy and things that I can’t even fathom.
In my mind this wasn’t imagination, this was fact. Imagination was delusion; this world, however, was just always a tiny bit out of reach, just a little farther than anyone dared to travel. And one day I would look on the news and see this world filled with news crews and station vans and stiff suits and stiff hair.
Paradise found, they’d say. Everything as we know it has changed. With this new information, school is cancelled, work is cancelled, all the money and paper and beepers will be burned; we have been operating under boring pretenses.
It would be a miracle. The kind that was always promised to me.
But alas… my brain has adapted to new information. I was taught out of my imagination. Not out of any malice of course, it’s just from interacting and living you eventually learn that you are silly and flawed and should not only watch what you say and do, but how you think.
Miracles though, well I still come-by miracles. They’re just smaller, more realistic. The fact that we haven’t blown ourselves up yet, that’s a miracle. With any knowledge of the past one hundred years at all, it wouldn’t make any sense that we still be alive today.
But fantasy has been almost entirely compromised. Well, in some cases it’s vanished, in others it has been tainted by carnality, social and chemical programming. Get this, drive this, fuck this, predictable, commonplace daydreams.
Those once unreachable goals have turned into generic standby desires out of fear of failure. (I mean, if I went my whole life searching for the secret grotto that wasn’t there, it would be a life wasted… right?) I want simple things: I want to write, I want to be a dad, I want to be a husband, I want to be an incredible lover, I want to create, rebel, I want stories to tell the grandkids about. Sometimes it’s enough to have faith in these things, because often they seem as outlandish as anything else I’ve ever believed in.
I certainly miss it though. I miss seeing things that aren’t there. I miss knowing the unknown, having answers to questions that nobody even asked.
Now it’s enough to watch a movie and have someone do the work for me. The world has a shortage of everything except for escapism.
That’s the difference though. As a kid I imagined that my world was special. As a semi-adult I can only believe that other worlds are special. My world is predictable. There is a science and logic and process to everything. Levitation is on its way, telepathy… talk to enough people, you’ll be able to read minds. Most of the time, predictions based on surface appearances will come true. I can tell you the outcome of most romantic interactions before they even begin, whether I’m involved or not.
So I take it back, I’m a skeptic and a cynic, a realist and a pessimist. But I’m willing… nay, excited to one day admit defeat.
I just want to be amazed.
