The Magic That Broke

I like to believe in magic.

Not in a vague way. Not as something abstract or symbolic. I believe it to be real. Something you can feel, something you can learn, something that exists just beneath the surface of everything.

That belief didn’t come from nowhere.

It came from Magic.

She was my mom’s older sister. One of my favorite aunts. The one who felt different from everyone else. Where most other adults felt distant, distracted, or cold, she felt present. Bright. Like she was actually there with you.

When I was with her, things felt lighter.

My home life wasn’t.

My father was cold. Mean in ways that didn’t always need words. There was a constant tension in the house, something I didn’t know how to explain at the time but felt all the same. I didn’t have the language for it. I didn’t even really understand it.

But she did.

Or at least it felt like she did.

She never made me explain it. Never asked me to put it into words. It was like she could see it anyway. And when I was with her, it didn’t matter as much. Whatever was happening at home didn’t follow me there in the same way.

She made space for me.

Not by fixing anything. Just by being who she was.

Warm. Open. Full of something that felt real in a way I didn’t question.

I remember telling her once, when I was really young,

“I wish magic was real.”

She looked at me like she didn’t understand the question.

“What do you mean?” she said. “It is real. It’s everywhere. It’s in you. You just have to learn how to see it and use it.”

Something like that.

I believed her instantly.

Not because it made sense. Just because she said it.

And that changed something.

It’s strange how small moments can shift the direction of everything. Like changing your path by half a degree and ending up somewhere completely different without realizing when it happened.

That moment stayed with me.

It still has.

For a long time, she was that for me.

Not just someone I loved. Something closer to… an anchor point, but not in the way that word usually feels. Not something that held me down. Something that showed me there was more.

Her and Wizard.

That’s what I’ll call him.

They felt like they had built something solid. Something stable. The kind of life that made sense from the outside. It looked like it worked. Like they had figured something out.

I didn’t question it.

I didn’t question them.

And then, years later, something small broke it.

Or maybe it just revealed something that was already fragile.

This was after everything with Anchor ended.

After things had already started falling apart.

I moved into a place through someone my mom knew. Eight hundred dollars a month. At the time, I was still working, so it seemed manageable. Barely, but enough.

I had already been warned at work about my attendance. I was on my last chance. One more late day and that was it.

So I quit.

I told myself I would make it work doing DoorDash and Uber Eats. That I could just shift into something else and be fine.

I was wrong.

I didn’t have the discipline for it. The orders weren’t consistent. It was unstable in a way I didn’t fully grasp until I was already in it.

It felt like watching something fall apart in slow motion.

I could see where it was going.

I just didn’t stop it.

At some point, trying to stay above water, I went behind her back.

I asked Wizard if I could borrow four hundred dollars to make rent.

In my head, it felt like nothing. They seemed well off. Four hundred dollars felt like something small. Something temporary.

He gave it to me without hesitation.

But I didn’t pay it back.

Not when I said I would.

I kept pushing it. Delaying. Letting it sit there while everything else kept getting worse.

And eventually, it turned into something else.

Something ugly.

I don’t remember every detail of what happened next.

Just flashes.

A phone call.

Anger that escalated too quickly.

Words that shouldn’t have been said.

I remember screaming.

Telling her her marriage was a joke.

I don’t even know if I said that directly to her or to my mom. It all blurs together at that point.

Just that I said it.

That I meant it in that moment.

And that it couldn’t be taken back.

It’s strange how something so small on the surface can carry so much weight.

Money.

Four hundred dollars.

That’s what it was about.

But it wasn’t.

It was everything underneath it.

Everything I wasn’t handling.

Everything I wasn’t facing.

Everything that had already started unraveling.

That moment just gave it a place to land.

Things have never been the same since.

Time passed.

Distance settled in.

Not a clean break, just something that never fully came back together.

And now, she feels like something I can still see, but not reach.

I miss her.

I miss talking to her. I miss the way she understood things without needing them explained. I miss the version of the world that existed when she was part of it.

I miss the magic.

She invited me to Easter recently.

The first real olive branch in a long time.

I don’t know what it means yet.

I don’t know if things can ever be what they were.

But it’s something.

And for the first time in a while, it feels like maybe not everything is completely gone.

Maybe some things don’t disappear.

Maybe they just wait.