There’s always this one magic that only you, and perhaps a little of Leah, can spell. This is the type of magic that can make the jeepneys that I ride grow its own steel wings and fly above the burgeoning traffic that haunts my everyday, and alight on another big magical place somewhere in time.
You had it, but I don’t like to predispose any of it, because I think everyone has some special way of affecting their own type of magic.
But yours is different. Yours is Gabriel Garcia Marquez kind of spellbinding, surreal, almost real and hard to forget, moving in time but never changing along with it.
That is what I don’t understand. There are times when I’m almost posed to believe that the magic brought us to grow up in some small, quintessential town in South America where at such young ages we only know the bitter taste of rebellion, where we are characterized as some mercurial mysterious writers about to set ablaze the hearts of others through the things we write and don’t write, where we ride the motorcycle of our dreams strapped on the back of the then-hot-now-dead Señor Guevarra.
I’d almost believe it, but then I hear Emma Bunton and the 4 other girls shrieking “Who do you think you are?” and suddenly it hits me. Not that it hits me and realize there is no magic but it hits me that my name was not Gael and yours wasn’t Maria and we don’t have thick accents but we’re rather just a bunch of giggly ten-year olds who only cared about the millions of fickleness of the world like how Zachary Walker Hanson does it, you know, being the cutest thing on television? Or like how everyone caught fever when Nick Carter was rumored dead, or why on earth “My Heart Will Go On” was always number one though we always thought Britney was as lovable.
Otherwise, I think our magic is the ‘90s, those years when hair spray was mythical, and singing Christmas carols on-stage with mismatched suspenders and knee-high socks was the coolest thing we could imagine. The ‘90s had colors only you and me have seen, and scents that all these years remained classified in the depths of our nostrils. Those scents, the cordoning smells of salt in adolescents, of perfumed stationeries we used to write our pen-pals in God-knows where, of newly sharpened yellow pencils or gummy-bear erasers, of burning Mommy’s Pizza in the canteen, of a newly-opened Fanta soda… scents stuck unfading on my wrists. Remembering these is like wading through a crowd and you suddenly smell the familiar scent and begin to look for the person wearing it. I end up looking for you in people I meet and all the colors and scents only us have seen and smelled while we were growing up.
I think the magic, among others, is growing up with you during the ‘90s. The magic involves X-man-Are You Afriad of the Dark?-Baywatch Friday nights that never look forward to Mondays and, much later on, includes the magic of Carrie Bradshow and HBO Saturday Night Presentations and Oprah. It involves many ephemeral things but what made them stay is a matter of mystery hidden between those fantastic afternoons spent at the field. It constitutes nostalgia, or some advance form of it that could only make me run after my breath for its sheer size and contents. The magic is like finding an old romantic letter in a forsaken mailbox and realize that it has been addressed to you.
As we get older, how many more magic will you spell?
Find the magic in 22. I know you will. And when you swing by my city come this December, we’ll cloud it with cigarette smoke, and we’ll talk about why my heart still longs for some more magic.
20 something, quarter-life crisis, loss of love, name it, nothing's weird.
