We knew it was fantasy, that we were just pretending, but we wished we weren’t. We tried to believe, filled with the sense that if only we could conquer our doubt, we could make it true. We would find the door in the woods, the world in the back of the wardrobe, the dragon’s egg left nestled in the loam. We knew the world was cruel and dirty and dull, and it was all so brutally unfair that we refused to accept it. There was magic in the world. We only had to find it.
