one night

i had a couple good friends, once. before i got myself involved in all this fucking bullshit. in fact, i was pretty well liked back in middle school. i was a bit of a class clown, strange as that might sound. in high school, my friend group changed a bit. the friends you make as a class clown aren't the friends you keep as an obsessor over the esoteric, as it happens.

my best friend, the only one i kept in the transition from middle school to high school, was named giles. he was my age, and had a grandpa on his mom's side named markus. when markus learned i was interested in magic, his eyes lit up. he was a stage magician, see, though i was always convinced he had real powers too.

he liked to give us demonstrations of his tricks, and he'd explain all of them. except for one.

that one was the star of the show, he said. no point in demystifying it. it would just weaken it. i always thought that excuse was a little cheap. if that was the case, why explain the rest? a magician never reveals his secrets, indeed.

the trick... it's a little difficult to explain, but the short story is that he seemed to disappear and reappear. no trapdoors, no doubles, it all took place at giles' house. it was the only trick that wasn't small enough to be faked easily in such an environment. and it was the one trick he refused to explain.

kids aren't as dumb as they look. (sorry, kids.) i think i had the right idea when i suspected markus of being a real magician. i couldn't prove it, i don't think, but it feels right.

giles was pretty different. he liked magic as much as anyone would, sure, but he didn't care about it quite like i did. when i was interested in stage magic, he thought of it all as trickery, and that's fair, because it's true. but that doesn't make it any less real. certainly, it's just as real as the kind of esotericism i indulged in as a teenager, which he never outright derided, but seemed to treat with a sort of silent... confusion, really. (i guess it's really all about appearances. stage magic is flashy. occultism is sketchy, quite deliberately so. it's an art form whose main practitioners are brooding teenagers and the occasional stuffy guy from the 1800s. it's only natural that the kinds of effects they produce, both in terms of real output and in terms of impression on the audience, are pretty different.)

other than that one sticking point, giles and i were close. we'd known each other for so long, it would be hard not to develop some sort of sentiment towards one another. in our case, we started off as friends, and eventually, we realized we had feelings for each other. but that... it scared me, i think.

i don't play well with others.