You Have to Believe...

She had always believed in magic. 

It was hard to hold on to that belief as she got older. 

Not because she lost her belief but because others tried their best to take it from her.

They were constantly trying to educate away the small everyday magics in her life.

Dew drops on plants first thing in the morning when there had been no rain. Lightning flashing across in the sky in patterns that looked like letters if she could only remember the letters she had seen before. The different patterns of clouds in the sky. Some fluffy and high like cotton candy, some flat and scattered like they had been painted by a giant brush. 

Every class she had, worked to explain the phenomena that she saw. And the answer was never magic. 

And it wasn't okay with them that she didn't want to know. You couldn't clap your hands over your ears and say NO SPOILERS! and make them stop. You had to know this thing and that thing for the test. And if you failed the test they didn't let you keep your belief they made you take even more classes where they spent even more time explaining away everything that was beautiful. She couldn't find any way to get out of it.

When she was in middle school one of her classmates was allowed to leave class during certain science lessons. He was excused due to his family's religious beliefs. They couldn't make him learn something he didn't believe in and he had a note saying so. 

Her classmate hated that he had to leave. He hated that he was singled out and made to feel different. He hated that the kids teased him and called him a fundy. Even though they didn't really know what a fundy was. 

She actually thought being a fundy sounded kind of nice. Fun was right there in the word. And it meant that you didn't have to learn certain things. Though he was never dismissed during the classes she would want to be dismissed during. He mostly skipped evolution and sex education. Which evolution was kind of magic even when they tried to explain it away so she didn't mind that one. He also was rarely allowed to watch the movies the class got as special treats. Which seemed really unfair but he didn't want to make them watch the only movies his parents would have approved. Which when she asked him one day what those movies were he said he didn't want to talk about it. Not fun at all.  

By the time she was in high school she had learned that religious people did not like their beliefs compared to magic. Even though a lot of it was magical thinking and she never could figure out what the difference was between a miracle and magic. But somehow they knew, and it was important to them that it was different. 

She worked her way through various clubs and organizations. Most of the time when people talked about magic they meant tricks. And they wanted to teach her how to do them too. Which was worse than not having anyone else who loved magic around her. Those people were as bad as her teachers in school. They took something that was magic and made it a trick. And then told people it was magic even though it was a trick and could be taught. It made her head and her heart hurt. 

She tried a group of wiccans but they got mad at her when she asked about magic. We DON'T do that! That's insulting! Well, yeah, it was insulting. How could they call themselves witches when what they really were was just a group of women who liked to camp? Even the ones who did things like charge crystals by the full moon made up pseudosciencey sounding things to explain away what they were clearly hoping was magic. 

Sometimes there would be someone who seemed like they believed as well. They did things like building fairy doors in their gardens. But usually when she talked to them about it they just claimed it was art. Nobody believed fairies really lived in your garden after all. 

It was almost impossible to hold on to the magic that seemed so easy when she was younger. 

Thank goodness she had Clyde. He believed as well. And she trusted him when he spoke to her. When he would tell her that she was right. That there was magic in the world. That the dew drops were really left from the fairies who played on the roses in the night. That the lightning did make letters and sometimes whole words but so quickly that most people couldn't read their secrets. That giants did paint the clouds in the sky. Even though some of them just called it art and pretended there weren't humans there to appreciate the patterns. She trusted Clyde. 

Even though people tried and tried to say dogs were more trustworthy than cats.