Infant Infatuation

Now I've gone and done it.

I've gone and met a boy I really, really, really like. (I say boy because he's twenty-four.) Of course, he's not wealthy (he's a paralegal, of all things--poetic, eh?). He's not devastatingly drop-dead tongue-hangin'-out-of-my-mouth gorgeous (though he's got blue eyes the size of dinner plates and a cleft chin and dimples). What he is is a writer. A real one. The kind who imagines entire worlds and then, word by word, creates them.

Gods, am I a sucker for men with imaginations. What has been a constant surprise to me in my life thus far is their terrible scarcity. The imagination is created by magic and generates more magic in return. If you don't believe that, you don't have an imagination. Period. Hardly anyone believes in magic anymore. So here I am, my soul brimming with secrets not because I wouldn't share them but because no one wants them. I believe in magic and ghosts and invisible worlds and all the things everyone else stopped believing in when they were seven--the age of reason.

I can be as logical as hell, but few have ever accused me of being reasonable. I guess I've been reasonable enough to tone down my own imagination, my magic, while I was stuck in the Sartrean Hell that was my last relationship--a writer trying to be in love with one who hates reading almost as much as he hates brushing his teeth; can you imagine? It was like an episode of the Twilight Zone, except it took six years for the end credits to finish rolling. I still have no idea why I would do such a horrible thing to myself. But I did.

He was as jealous of my writing as if it were a lover I had taken to annoy him, because it brought me such immense joy, and because he couldn't understand or share it. That's what happens when you're with someone who doesn't know what brings him the most joy in all the world, nor cares to seek it, nor so much as notices it's missing from his life. He first sees you as his beacon and wants to bask in the magic of your light; then he feels outshone and diminished; then he wants to take your light entirely away.

As Rose Kennedy no doubt said so many times, "Thank God that shit's over."

Have you ever become acquainted with a little child or an old person who really liked you? Right away, they will reach out to you, take you by the hand, look you in the eye without hint of artifice and say, "I like you." They do this because they know themselves--a child by instinct, an old person by trial, error, and wisdom. Since they know themselves they know instantly whether they like you, and they see no reason to withhold this happy information from you.

This boy and I have taken that kind of liking to each other (though I hate to think who's the old person and who's the child). It's the simplest kind, perhaps the rarest (among people somewhere between childhood and old age, at any rate), and the best.

How I wish more people believed in magic. I don't think I will ever understand why they don't.