Magic

When I was a child and everything was still drawn up by magic, there hid a place of treasures behind my neighbor's large house with the windows he could almost surely see me through. I explored there first with my older brother, before the too-cool years when time spent imagining by myself replaced star-wars secret games and you're-the-best-sister time. There was a separation of trees where that mute neighbor kept what I know now to be a junkyard, but then it was beautiful and curious and oh, it was magic. Magic magic magic. 

The car was the first thing in view. It sat upon sullen tires mysteriously out of breath where they slouched amidst glass that had fled from its window unity to a melted runway in the green. It was the old fashioned kind of car with roll-down windows and a baby blue memory peaking behind stubborn rust. Beside the car tumbled a stack of beheaded mannequins who were blindly naive of their giggle inducing nakedness. Holiday ornaments dangled from ordinary cedar trees across form these plastic corpses, their colors drained from a vibrant celebratory past but inexplicably still charming and achingly fascinating. 

The other details of the clearing are buried in my memory, but are still enchanted with shattered sunlight mirrored from the car glass, a sparkling luminous fragment of an otherwise ordinary childhood that was drizzled with moments of magic that play over in my mind like old songs. Since my more conscious years, I have often imagined returning to the clearing I spent so many summers sneaking in, but I resist due to my paralyzing fear of polluting that magical retreat with the infectious ordinariness that descends insidiously upon us as we age. This fear preserves those infant memories in precious sunlight, unscarred by skepticism and therefore infinitely magic magic magic.