My Personal brand of Magic

My Hogwarts acceptance letter was never coming.

I slumped resignedly on my bed. I was in college, It was my eighteenth birthday when I finally lost hope of the Hogwarts dream.

I clearly remember how it all started, the Summer of a thousand books.

It was in the public library, a thick red covered book was peeping from amidst the Nancy drews. As it were, Familiarity mostly breeds neglectance, and I would have passed the section without another look had not its apparent girth stood out from the rest.

This thick volume with scrawny text was not my cup of tea and I vaguely recall admonishing the book and promising myself never to read such a dull monologue ever. I was happily content with the Kirrin cousins, and all the other brainchildren of Blyton’s imagination, sprawled happily over finite pages describing their adventures.

A friend was suggesting books to me, and she clearly despised this one. It was my natural defiance that made me bring that book back home.

It was with a tinge of initial reluctance that precedes any and all novelty, a speck of repulsion to the thickness of the book and a mental estimation of time that would be engulfed in the process of finishing the book that I finally sat down to read it. By the crack of dawn, Sirius was a free man and Harry had a godfather. By the end of the week, I had read everything Rowling had on Harry.

Thus began the most fulfilling part of my life, my unquenching thirst for all kind of magic.Though in reality the seed had be sown long ago, in sleepless nights enveloped in the sheath of Fairy tales and Maa’s magical stories of angels, trolls and dark witches.I basically fashion myself as a thinker and what I mostly think about are the various prospect of attaining magic and bringing it to a use and how.

Through all my lengthy contemplations of the topic, I have decided exactly the kind of magic I want to have for myself. I don’t aspire to be a Harry Potter esque witch anymore, neither do I want to have wings and eternal life. I want to be able to manipulate the elements, the basics of all life forms. I don’t want to fly on a firebolt, I want the wind to carry me in its stead. Neither do I crave for immortality unlike most of the magic enthusiasts. I only want to live until I have realized my destiny and the leave my magical heritage to the most worthy.

Il n'y a pas de fumée sans feu, and that’s precisely why my belief in magic has such a stronghold on my psyche. One cannot dispel everything as a work of mere fiction, but maybe it is just a subconscious theory to aide my hope. And in my most dark days I end up formulating a scientific reasoning to nullify the aforementioned claim.

To be able to deny the truth and mould it in accordance to your will, to change the weather to your whim, to stop and alter the reality. Magic is an escapist’s paradise. In some ways, I believe it is akin to religion; a static postulate for hope, if nothing else.

I have a knack for being vindictive, maybe that’s why I haven’t yet received the gift of magic. Because in each of my magical fantasies, after all the learning and travelling (in both space and time), I end up striking down and mutilating the lives of people who have wronged me. In the defense of the keepers of magic, I can only find this excuse fitting for their reluctance to give me what I want.

Alas!

Magic is my horcrux, it’s a part of my soul. The ultimate horror would be to never witness and marvel at it in reality. That’s what keeps me up at night sometimes.

Paulo Coelho says in the Alchemist that when we are children, our hearts tell us exactly what we want to be, how our destiny should be. But when we grow up and labor under the truth of practicality and the social limitations, we move away from our most innate desires, we forget our dreams to accommodate those that are most feasible and socially acceptable. Society murders dreams in more than one way, and when those dreams slowly dissipate away, it’s the heart that weeps the most. I can’t comprehend how a heart weeps, but if it’s anything like the hollow crunch of asphyxiation, of being thrown into an endless pit of stark hopelessness that keeps me up at nights, I can only empathize.

I want to be able to swim in the skies, to apparate from one place to another, to have flowers bloom in the midst of winter, to be able to play with my personal time, go back and just witness myself and all the backstage drama that make up our life stories but can never be witnessed in the first person. I want to change lives, to make impossible happen. I want magic, and some days I end up believing that I almost need it.

In its absence the heart may weep and in time the dream will just perish beneath the dusty cobwebs in the heart, the place where it will just be visited as an old relic of a gone past.

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