We Forgot We Were Magic

We Forgot We Were Magic
By Z Zoccolante

I’ll drop you into the thoughts in my head as though we’re old friends having one long conversation, as though you just walked into the room. . .

And I listen to Devi Prayer, which I just discovered and used to process forgiveness, when I had to first get through the hate to get to the love.

I listen to Devi Prayer again and think about the end of movies, where all the events have transpired and the character is at the pivotal moment of awakening along the hero’s journey – of walking on the beach, of slow motion while the world passes by, of a hand against a glass window, the final look before turning the page, leaving things behind, moving forward into unknown possibility.

This is what I tell him as we drive and we nod and listen as the street lights turn against the blackness of the night. I picture the beach nearby where the concrete sparkles full of glitter stars and the waves roll in. The pier where I dropped and offered my rings to the eternity of lost and found things – and I release all the mistakes, all the ways I could have loved you better, all the ways I could have loved myself . . .  but I didn’t know how.

And now as infinity stretches before my fingertips I can see that we are only a breath, we are only a small sliver from touching the magic mirror to bring us home.

And I throw my penny into the wishing well, watch it twirl and plop into the fountain. I tell him my thing that I answered at a conference once. The question: How do I love you? My answer: make me happy and show me a new world. Everyone likes that he says and I realize why my best friend in college had such a pull on my heart.

She’d knock on my window and I’d crawl out to join her, with her lap full of photography books and her stories about living in the dark room and watching things develop out of darkness. In her little blue bug, taking me to eat soup in the rain, calling cashiers by their names, telling me that you can’t be sad while eating ice cream, showing me magic and taking me on adventures at 3AM to eat pancakes that tasted like cupcakes at a little hole in the wall.

And I was elated with her presence, captivated by the way she moved through the world as though she had wings and everything was a divine secret waiting to unfold for our unlimited joy.

It was the same elation I felt with my ex love when we held pennies by the gas station under yellow streetlights on our first date and hiked the lighthouse in the dark.

Pinpricks of white stars full of possibility. But somewhere along the line . . .

We forgot we were magic.
We forgot we were magic.

And we blended in with everyone else and went with the rive of people. We lost ourselves and then we lost each other. We got swept away into a sea of chaos and other things, shiny objects floating by, things in the depths.

We forgot we were magic.
We forgot we were magic.

Once upon a time I had a little magic heart and a magic world and I felt like my life were a movie and it was all the good parts and the bad parts, but it was the part where they played the music and everything came together the way it was supposed to all along and you were left knowing everything would be exactly as it should be, the only way it could be.

And I rode in a little blue bug and I adventured in the world and in my backyard as the sun danced upon my skin. But as the years dragged forward I lost the connection like a boat tethered at sea while each wave etches groves in the rope that holds it and until it broke because no one was watching the finer details.

I learned how to swim when I was young. I swim like a fish and in the aftermath, I grew gills and a tail and learned how to be a mermaid. Then I learned how to split my fin and make legs and breath air and lie in the sun again. What I had thought was the end of it all was just a small break, a reminder of what I’d forgotten.

My magic was there all along. It’s just a remembering now. Even though I wish we could have done that together, the music tells me maybe there was no other way but for me to become part mermaid and for you to sail to other shores.

I hope you remember your magic. I hope you find it in yourself, tucked away in the secret places of your heart, until the magic mirror brings us home.

And in all the all, all the ways I could have loved you better, all the ways I could have loved myself. Now I know how. Now I remember. Magic.

With Love

Z :)