Young minds mold around the magic of the moment but
maybe you don’t appreciate the magic because
magic is everywhere
and life is, itself, magical because nothing has ruptured this purity of the mind
until you start to see things that seep into the cracks in the façade like
little tendrils of smokey black menace, pealing back the shield to expose the soft
underbelly
of all you never thought was there.
But as an adult I see magic and I immediately seek to disprove it
because magic isn’t real
but I had a potty-trained iguana as a kid and
it was magic
so magic that I’m not even sure now,
as an adult,
whether it’s real at all because it’s fractured and broken by all the things
that I’ve seen
That aren’t magic.
All the things that one human will do to another, that life will do to humanity, that humanity will do to life, and the fault lines that shake you out of the mindset
you used to be in
when humans were just
funny shaped sacks of jokes and laughter and didn’t want to hurt you
but now clearly do.
Maybe my iguana wasn’t potty trained.
Maybe she was just an iguana.
But I’ll keep believing.
Josh Sippie is the Director of Publishing Guidance at Gotham Writers. His writing can be found at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Writer Magazine, Brevity, Hobart, and more. When not writing, he can be found wondering why he isn't writing. Twitter: @sippenator101