when the magic isn't working

what to believe in //

love magic // bottled on 1.21.24

It’s Monday morning and my six-year-old daughter tells me she doesn’t think her magic is working anymore.

Yesterday while the rain got thick she sat at our dining room table and painstakingly filled tiny glass vials with different shades of glitter and water. I watched from across the table as she scrunched her nose and shook them with violent enthusiasm one by one, bringing each bottle close to her face and squinting her eyes as she evaluated its contents. She lined them up and labeled them: one for rainbows, one for luck, one for love, one for growing, one for glowing. I asked her about that last one. It helps with the darkness, she said. Then she closed her eyes and dipped her head down like she was about to silently say grace. And maybe she was. She looked at each for the last time and then packed the potions away in a small box and washed her hands. Doing magic makes me itchy.

But now it’s seven in the morning and she’s sitting on my lap saying her magic isn’t working. She begins to list out the evidence in a low whisper: she wished for a rainbow and the sky is only gray, nothing lucky has happened to her yet, nothing lucky is happening to anyone anywhere it seems, kids all over the world are still being killed, people everywhere are dying, we are always dying, her magic isn’t strong enough to save anyone, maybe her magic isn’t even real, maybe there’s no such thing. I hold her and put my cheek to her cheek and breathe her in. I don’t know how many more years it’ll be like this, her limbs folding into mine as she sighs deeply and looks at my face expectantly, like maybe I alone can fix what is broken.

I shrug my shoulders and grasp for the words, for a way to describe the kind of magic I know to be true, the kind of magic that connects our bodies to each other. The kind of magic that connects us to our earth, and our earth to our universe. The kind of magic that makes me feel like believing. But the words don’t come so I just keep holding her. She’s looking down and I think she’s about to slip away when she suddenly turns to face me with a smile.

I just felt something. She says this with dramatic flair, pausing to see how I react. I gasp with an appropriate level of surprise. Two people. Just now. On the other side of the planet. They’re falling in love. She bounces off my lap. Maybe my magic still works. Maybe it’s just slow magic.

Hours later, while she’s at school, a rainbow arches across the sky. 

rainbow magic in Berkeley, California // 1.22.24