There's a mundanity to the day that only rears after you experience something truly special. It's in the way that routines bleed together, days flowing into each other. Time passes fast when no one's looking at it, rocking us back and forth with the motions of reality. I wake up a thousand times. I get dressed a thousand times. I lock the door a thousand times. I peek into the darkness a thousand times, looking for something new, looking for anything at all, anything that could take me away from here.
It's in the leering stares on the streets, the tight grimaces of passers by. I'd seen hell and maybe it was better than this because people there wore their teeth and their claws on the outside. I'm watching the crowds flow and dance. They shimmer with a kind of bored radiance, the opposite of life. The lines and dim pop music are the antithesis of existence, the bane of humanity.
I nurse a rapidly cooling cup of coffee, the window of the shop letting in that dim winter light. My laptop sits before me, a blank page letting me know that I have work to do. It's been a few hours. It'll probably be a few more before I actually start. I lean back against the pillow, feeling the mass of the chair pressing through it. It is not especially comfortable. But then again, neither am I. I crouch low in dark spaces. I avoid the subways. Sometime a shadow flits over me and my adrenaline actives and my fight or flight tells me that I only have seconds to respond. Were these aftereffects? Was I always like this?
I can't get their face out of my mind. Sometimes, when my hands are wandering in class, I find myself doodling them in the margins of the page. At least, that's what I thought I was doing. I didn't realize what I was actually doing until the person sitting next to me leaned over to look and donned an expression of perfect horror and disgust. I studied my work. Looping symbols without beginning or ending, seemingly impossible. People with faces missing, with too many features, with impossible bodies. Looking at the page kind of hurt, like a dull thud in the back of my head, like the blood pouring from open wounds, like a whispered whine about unhealed wounds. A warning.
Maybe the world is full of things we're not supposed to understand and for a moment my brain lifted the filter and let me see. Maybe I can try but it'll never quite snap back right and I'll always see the monsters. Once you start looking for it, it's pretty clear that there are monsters. Reality is fake. It's a comforting lie, but a lie is all that it is. No one understands the world. We instinctively move faster in the dark places because there are things in dark places, and sometimes it's men who want to hurt us, and sometimes it's beasts with claws and fangs, and sometimes it's both at once. How can you tell the difference between life and death, faith and logic? I don't think you can.
I find myself drinking alone at home, a bottle of vodka with no mixers. I like the fire of it down my throat. And as something meaningless plays on the tv, as a sketchbook I keep meaning to fill lies open on the table, as my body splays on the couch, I keep thinking I can still smell them. They smelt like blood and darkness and the coldest metal. They smelt like they would kill me. They smelt safe.
Am I crushing? Is that what this is? That can't be right. I don't crush, for starters. I am a powerful and responsible woman and I don't need no partners. Besides, I only met them one time and they used it to absolutely destroy me. I mean, really. I'm just a normal person. I could never match them. And god, did you see how hot they were? Totally out of my league. No, I was not crushing. I was just curious. Who wouldn't be curious about seeing something new like that?
We get wisps of snow at the very start of December. Nothing to celebrate really. It sticks around for one morning, enough to convince me to wear heavy boots. Two steps out the door and I remembered how I fucked up the insoles last year, and they bend and twist around my feet uncomfortably. I'm already late. My alarm went off 3 times before I got up, moaning, dragging myself to my feet and a small bowl of cereal. I stumble to class, heavy boots and thick leather jacket, way too much weight for the weather, for my weak legs. I'm overdressed the rest of the day. As the teacher drones on about the new mathematical rule for today, I find my attention wandering to that trick they'd done with the coat, how they conjured it from nowhere. Wouldn't that be useful? Certainly more useful than this 400 level elective math class I thought would be fun.
I felt disjointed. Elsewhere. I'd go to bars with friends and watch as they drank and talked about sex and homework and life. I didn't really feel like part of the group anymore, and would excuse myself and slip home. It just all felt so pointless. If the night was full of monsters and magic, who cares? I took up wandering the streets near my apartment at night. I'd wrap myself up tight in a jacket like armour, the weight of it providing significance and comfort. Clutching a knife in one pocket, I stalked the streets, jaywalking or just walking down the middle of roads. Under streetlights and past closed stores and by tall apartment buildings, the dull smack of feet against concrete. I started to learn where the alleys where, where the gardens began, where the holes in the ground intersected those in reality. I saw balconies and connections between buildings, old trees and young ones, other hunters like myself. And in the shadows, we began to see them.
I caught myself retracing the route sometimes. I could justify it. The grocery store over there has cheaper prices. I could take a long walk over for exercise and then subway back if I were tired. There's a fun thrift store. But really, I was just retaking the route that had me meet them. Really, I was just riding the subway once a week, hoping they would step onto my train.
You gotta move on, you know? You gotta redownload the dating apps, you gotta try to reach out. Form a connection. At least, that's the theory behind surviving a breakup, and how could this be any different? Mind you, has anyone ever invented a worse way to meet people than dating apps? I might fill out my profile, but what's the point? Given how little effort anyone puts into theirs, I doubt they're reading mine. So it's pictures alone and that suggests they just want to fuck me. I kinda of miss it when I went on dates with friends of friends. But also, I don't really miss dating at all. At least, I don't really need it for the normal reasons.
But still, the dates. Constantly the dates. Bars, restaurants, walks in the park, movies at home, and even bowling one time. A flood of new people, all identical in their anonymity, their inability to stand out.
I think that everyone is at the centre of their own little world in a way that no one else will understand. I think that we're all magical, it's just that only a few of us have realized it. It's in the ways people turn away. It's in how we protect and defend our privacy from prying eyes, fighting valiantly to keep ourselves safe. But some of us are more so than others. And, a month after I figured out that magic was real, I started figuring out what to look for.
It's a kind of spark, you know? Something in the eyes that suggests life. That suggests the unknown. People will never admit it. But it's in the easy ways they handle fire, they handle danger. It's in comfort with dark spaces. It's in symbols hanging from necks and tattoos concealed behind long sleeves. It isn't subtle. Some of us our touched. And they flaunt it because they think I can't tell.
We meet in bars and we drink and tell stories and laugh. I'll listen, not to the story itself, but to the empty spaces between, the places where the truth of the matter has been removed. The core of the magic, if you will. I'll listen and nod and buy you a drink and smile charmingly and swap stories of my own. And when the night is short and the witching hour is nigh and you hand is resting gently on my arm and your smile is wide and your laugh is infectious, I'll lean in and whisper the tale of the time I met a monster and lived.
Most of them run. Some of them just walk, quietly excusing themselves and heading out. A few laugh it off, and perhaps I was misjudging them. Perhaps they were too normal for it. I wondered if I was breaking some great taboo to be telling this story at all, to be telling it in public. But surely it was mine to tell. Surely no one could stop me.
And there's a very tiny few who stare, open mouthed and wide eyed, whose first response is to ask for more. I had a strange time at a bar with one girl, very pretty but unbelievably awkward, laughing at all the wrong moments. She came dressed in all black, spiderweb tattoos over both arms, which shifted under her fishnet sleeves, like patterns dancing, like lines intersecting, like the arms of the monster. I studied them as I led the conversation in circles, bouncing off of every wall and every poorly timed laugh. And afterwards, as we walked along the lake, studying the way the city lights bounced off dark water, I told her about that night. And she stared at me, stunned, and begged to know more.
Magic, she claimed, was something that she had always wanted to learn. She had always believed it was real. I agreed with that. She couldn't tell me this enough though, repeating herself and stammering with excitement. And then she asked me to teach her and then she asked what my star-sign was and I felt my heart sink. Of course she didn't know anything. Of course not.
I started swiping during lectures. Sue me, the professors were boring anyway. It was almost always faster to catch up later, to study the textbook in the wee hours of the morning. I was becoming nocturnal, anyway. But I started swiping during lectures, the one relevant factor in the decision making was the likelihood that a given person might have touched the impossible. I started developing and testing rules and tricks. The sharpness of the eyes, the focus, the choice of photos, the use of language in the description. I put together the pieces and started to refine my model. I was getting pretty good, I thought. A walking magic detector, surely. People kept walking out though. It made it hard to confirm.
December rolled through exams, that tough and terrible time, when sleep becomes scarce and the students become quiet and fearful. There are tricks to exams. One of them is to study and so, my hobby fell to the wayside. I spent my days sleeping and my nights pouring over notes and books. Learning all the material I probably should've learned earlier.
I survived the exam period, thankfully. My grades came back okay. Perhaps not as well as I had hoped. But well enough, I was sure. What did grades matter for anything, anyway? There's a whole universe out there beyond the school.
Winter break was lonely. My roommates fled to city to their distant homes, to parents and siblings and cousins and other family members. My parents had asked if I wanted to come home. I'd said no. And so, I was alone in the apartment, with all the joys that came with it. I played music constantly and loudly. I took long baths and baked desserts and danced naked through the living room. I'd have thrown a party if I was convinced that people would come to it. I watched an unhealthy amount of tv and finally started breaking in that sketchbook and thought about how much I wanted to be held.
And then January rolled around and I flipped through my sketchbook and admired dozens of drawings of a vaguely remembered figure from months ago, whose humanity could never be captured by my pencil. Always the same contours of their body curving into a head that made no sense. The pieces were all there. A mouth, a nose, eyes, hair. But the assembly was deeply wrong, deeply fucked up. I'd even seen them as human. Really, it made no sense. But then again, what did?