When We Were Magic

by Sarah Gailey

the rest of us will try to stay out of the way as best we can because there are layers to that fight we don’t understand from the inside.

Watching her work is like watching a time-lapse video of a river’s course changing.

Or maybe it’s because police officers bring loaded guns into schools where we have regular drills about how to hide from people who bring loaded guns into schools. I don’t know—they just scare the shit out of me, okay? And they scare the shit out of just about everyone I know.

little spark of fear, like … what if I leave, and it turns out that this town is the best place there is? What if I go out there and I’m too small for the rest of the world? What if I can never come back, and everything out there is too much, and there’s no place for me after all?

They always do their best to listen to me, to let me be whoever I am and let me feel whatever I’m feeling, and in exchange I try not to be an asshole to them even when I’m feeling like an asshole. It’s a deal we’ve never discussed, but I know that’s the trade: I try not to be awful, and they try to let me figure myself out. But that weightless anger is still expanding in my chest, and it’s hard not to let it out.

We don’t push her the same way we push each other, because she’s got so many different levels of thinking and feeling and analyzing going on below the surface, and she has to sort them all out before she can talk about things. Most of the time, we let her come to us.

“She wasn’t saying ‘I love you in spite of who you are.’ She was saying ‘I might screw this up a lot, but the biggest thing is that I love you. The most important thing in my heart is that I love you.’

I might not understand right away. But I love you, and that doesn’t change. That’s the biggest, most important part of this.”

So there are some things I definitely know about the person I’m going to become. I know I won’t lie to myself as often as I used to, now that I understand how those lies I tell myself hurt other people whether I mean them to or not. I know I’ll try to let my friends love me as much as I love them, no matter how hard that is.

I know I won’t pretend to be any less powerful than I really am. Because now I know for sure: the worst part of me isn’t the strongest part of me.

Sometimes, not having the answers means hurting people, and that part is terrible. But a lot of the time, not having the answers means letting things be what they are.