Doing Magic

I only have one talent. Being able to learn tricks.

I'm really not good at anything else, but I've discovered that in every situation, there is always a trick you can learn.

There is a trick to getting girls to like you. There is a trick to turning strangers into friends. There is a trick to making people laugh. There is a trick to making people fall in love with you, just as there is a trick to getting yourself to fall in love.

There is a trick to dancing, painting, writing, surfing, and smiling.

There is a trick to coping with horror, there is a trick making people think that you believe what you're saying. There are tricks to saying awake, and going to sleep.

There are tricks to make yourself stay alive.

I was younger, nine or ten, and playing with a coin in my uncles apartment. I had just been informed that my mother was going to die, probably soon. If she lived, they said, she would be badly brain damaged.

I played with that coin. I could make it spin around my fingers. I flipped it up and around, in and out, with the dexterity of a boy who is yet to gain any cumbersome muscle and has just figured out how all the tendons in his hand fit together.

It was then that I knew, there is a trick to everything. My mother lived, in the end. She has no cancer, and no damage.

And now, as I lie here, flattened by the strange shapes that attack me when I sleep, and the crushing sadness that stays with me during waking hours. Transfixed by the weirdness of things, that the world is the wrong shape in my head, I wonder why it is that I am the way I am.

But, as with all things, there is a trick to living like this. I'm sure it is easier to learn than many other tricks, that fortunately I have never had to learn. And thankfully, it is a trick that I taught myself a long time ago, in much more terrible circumstances.

I was made this way, and my friends who sometimes worry about me, don't. Because I was also made with the ability to learn the tricks that make me able to deal with my problems so well that some people don't even realize they're there.

I'll always have a few up my sleeve. :)