But everybody's gone And I've been here for too long To face this on my own Well I guess this is growing up
Why yes, I am quoting Blink 182.
When I was younger, magic was very much associated with growing up in my mind. There's a pervasive trope of magic or superpowers coming on with puberty, and I think on some level I just believed that it would be one of those things that I had "figured out" to go along with being a Real Adult. And yet here I am at 33, still sorting through the pieces of Project Protagonist and consciously, intentionally trying to go back to the magic I practiced as a child.
When I was small I had a best friend. We were the same age and our mothers were friends, so it was that sort of... inevitable relationship, I suppose. We talked about magic a lot, Kelley and I did. We wrote out elaborate magical rituals in my notebooks and talked about how kids can see fairies but adults can't and we made plans for when we were older and we could do better magic.
Kelley lived in the next town over, so we only got to see each other on weekends, and as we got older and as we and our siblings had more activities on the weekends, we saw less and less of each other. When I went to Kelley's eleventh's birthday party, I said something about it.
There was just a blank look on Kelley's face. No idea what I was talking about. No memory of any of it, except maybe a fleeting reference to the silly games we used to play. The party was terrible and I don't know what Kelley's mom told mine in the morning but we didn't see each other again until late middle school, when Kelley and I happened to end up in the same room at a regional testing center.
We chatted like nothing had broken between us, but it was the hollow chatter where nothing is broken because nothing had been built in the first place.
I think of Kelley sometimes when I'm pulling out this or that thread of childhood experience, and I wonder what all of that looked like from the other side. From the point of view of the one who put away childish things. From the one who grew up.
After that party, I was terrified that growing up somehow was synonymous with forgetting, so I attached myself to the idea of Not Growing Up with Barrie-like zeal. I was certain that if Grew Up, I would have to give up magic and everything I understood about the universe.
Somewhere along the line I lost it anyway, and now I find myself in the position of reclaiming those childhood things even as I launch headlong through the markers of adulthood in society like marriage and upcoming parenthood. I am wondering now how I will teach my daughter what I believe, and what skill I can give her so she will grow up without forgetting. I know it can be done, and I'm sure it can be done better than I did. Hopefully I can give her the information she needs to learn from my mistakes and instead make her own. That sounds like powerful magic, if I can carry it off.