Magic Is Real and Frankly I'm Tired of Pretending Otherwise

I was walking Luna through my parents' backyard garden the other day, half-distracted, doing the thing where you're technically outside but still mentally answering emails. And then I saw the squash.

Huge. Practically bursting. Ready to be picked any day now. And right next to them, still hanging on, were the flowers they came from.

That flower is going to turn into a squash. I just stood there like an idiot, staring at it. That's magic. That's actual, undeniable magic, happening in my parents' backyard on a random Tuesday.

It sent me straight back to Florida, driving past acres of orange groves when the trees were still flowering — that's the first time I ever understood that fruit starts as a flower. The smell alone should be illegal. Intoxicating doesn't even cover it. And once I had that image in my head, I couldn't stop finding it everywhere. Caterpillars becoming butterflies. The eucalyptus scent that follows you across the entire Portuguese countryside, like the land itself is perfumed on purpose. A full moon lighting up the sky like it's showing off. The sun folding itself into the ocean every single night without fail.

And then, because my brain won't quit, I thought: planes. Planes are magic. Yes, I know — thrust, lift, drag, a hundred years of aerodynamics and math I will never understand. But strip away the vocabulary for a second and tell me that isn't magic. A few hundred people, in a metal tube, defying gravity, having a snack, watching a rom-com, 30,000 feet above the ground. Science didn't kill the magic. Science is the magic. We just gave it a syllabus.

I think somewhere along the way we decided magic and logic had to live on opposite ends of the room. Like believing in wonder makes you less serious. Less credible. Like you have to pick: are you a person who understands how things work, or are you a person who's still amazed by them?

I refuse that. I want both. I want to know the squash came from the flower and I want to stand in the garden and feel my chest go a little tight about it anyway.

Magic isn't the absence of an explanation. It's what's left over even after you have one.

So here's your permission slip, if you need one: let yourself be amazed by ordinary things. The flower-to-fruit thing. The plane thing. The moonlight thing. It's not naive. It's not woo-woo. It's just paying attention. And the world rewards you for it constantly, if you let it.