Your longing for magic leads you to invent your own magic worlds. Because here’s the thing: that loneliness, that lostness – it all has a purpose. I can see you lonely and lost, and I’m sorry that you can’t see me.
You won’t even realize it’s weird until the first time you have a friend over for dinner, in seventh grade, and when you all sit down at the table with a book she just stares, her mouth open. Everyone in your family reads at every meal. Your dad toting a big box of books to return, you and your brother and sister filling it up again with the new books for the week. I can see you at the library every Friday night with your family. Why wouldn’t you want to visit them over and over? They’re your friends when real kids aren’t. But you love them so much – Betsy, Tacy, and Tib Harriet Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter all of All-of-a-Kind Family the Melendys Meg and Charles Wallace Ged the wizard Claudia and Jamie. I can see you reading and re-reading all your favorite books, even when your parents shake their heads in bewilderment, wondering why anyone would want to read a book twice when there are so many books to read. You could be writing anything they all wonder about it.
The notebook defends you from what the other kids might be saying or thinking. You really, really want to be Harriet the Spy. I can see you huddled in the corner of the schoolyard at the alternative junior high, writing in your notebook. How do they come up with those awful nicknames? But you don’t cry. You’re overweight, and they’re despicable. I can see you hiding under the piano in the hallway outside your sixth grade classroom while the boys in the class make fun of you. You push your way to the back of every wardrobe, hoping to come out in Narnia. Lewis, and Edward Eager, and wishing so hard for magic to happen that it almost hurts. I can see you in fourth and fifth grade reading all the different-colored Andrew Lang fairy tale books, and C.S. I can still look back and see you as if it were yesterday.
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