We talked about realismo magico in Literature class, rehashing Garcia Marquez and Carpentier, the primitive and the neo-creative. But a thought: reality is simply another construction, another cardboard box we play-pretend is our house. And magic is as real or as make-believe as we want it to be, as we ponder the difference between realms of the impossible and realms of the improbable (not my terminology, but very eloquently put).
It still seems like I'm inhabiting different worlds, each bound by its own senses and rules. Magic of the conventional sort seems farther away here, though I remember it dusting my childhood, flakes of gold that drifted through the trees and into everything I made up. There was a wild sort of Magic in South America, tall like mountains and older than the landscape of a people now forgotten. It was intangible, yet inevitable, woven into the mythology of the places we saw. Here, perhaps it's forgotten in the ordinary, left behind like dried leaves swept up in a sweltering day, lost lost lost.
They teach us in writing that things happen in threes, it's a magic formula that somehow feels appropriate, satisfying. So perhaps it's only natural that I find myself caught between three world, always in triangles that draw their lines across continents, across languages, across time and space and heart. But I can't help feeling like I'm not listening enough, like if I could understand these whispers and shouts it would make more sense, it would conjugate and connect and the magic would make itself known. Can a person every really exist in threes, always feeling like a piece of themselves was lost in another world entirely? Which do I believe, which is a dream?