Prologue
“Special people experience the world differently from everyone else. They are filled by everything around them: evening sunsets and the dust of abandoned houses.” — A. K.
I closed the notebook and set it aside.
It was a collection of my father’s quotes. He had introduced me to reading when I was very young, and my favorite book was his notebook, where he wrote down the phrases and quotations that came to him. The notebook smelled of leather, ink, and old, crumpled pages. I do not know how long he had kept it, but… every time I held it in my hands, my heart gave a little shiver at its age.
Like any boy, I saw my father as the strongest, bravest, and most interesting person on the planet. I would take the notebook and begin asking him who the “special” people were, why they experienced the world differently, and what it meant to be “filled” by it.
Some things he explained in beautiful verse; for others, he let his imagination run free.
“They are people who hide among us and possess supernatural powers. They have magic wands and can use magic to achieve anything they want.”
“Like in Harry Potter?”
“Like in Harry Potter.”
“Then why are they hiding?”
“I don’t know.” He would only shrug. “Maybe they’re shy.”
He insisted that fairy tales were not tales at all, but accounts of days long past. Once, people had been gods. Zeus had been a man who controlled lightning, mermaids had lived side by side with humans, and the forests had been inhabited by strange beasts capable of human speech…
“How did they talk?” I would ask, my eyes wide with wonder.
“With their mouths, of course. How else? They lured little boys like you into the woods and ate them there!”
After saying this, my father would leap from his chair and chase me around the house while I ran from him, waving a pen that I pretended was a magic wand and believing its magic would stop him.
I believed all of it. I truly did. Of course I did: at a school where everyone wanted to become a firefighter or a doctor, I alone was destined to become a secret wizard to whom all the mysteries of the world would be revealed—from the flick of a wand to worlds no one had ever seen.
But the years passed, and under the pressure of the mundane world, every impossible childhood dream was destined to be destroyed. To make sure this did not happen at school, where I might be saddled with some awful nickname like “wizard boy,” my mother decided to get ahead of it.
She sat me down on the sofa, took a seat beside me, and said:
“Jake, you will never become a wizard. They don’t exist.”
“But how can that be? Dad says they do.”
“Dad made all of it up for a game, nothing more. There are no ‘special’ people who possess magic, and there is no magic at all.”
Some time later, she made my father say the same thing, but… I did not believe her.
Everything changed on Friday, October 25, 2024. That day divided my life into Before and After.
