It was the moment I started ugly crying while watching 'Elf' that I knew I had a real problem.
Look, I spent my entire childhood reading Harry Potter, desperate for my Hogwarts letter, and when I turned 11, guess what?
No fucking letter.
Twilight. Hunger Games. Freaking Percy Jackson. All these awesome worlds, all these amazing people and powers, and NOT ONE of them real.
I cried myself to sleep on my 11th birthday. My party was great. I had a lemon cake with lemon icing, with extra lemon. I got a giftcard to my favorite bookstore, and we even got to go to a play. It was everything my little theatre nerd heart could ever want, except for that Hogwarts letter.
No thick yellow parchment with loopy writing on it for me. No half-giant knocking down my door, and no horrible prophecy where I have to sacrifice myself to save the world.
Nope. The day after my 11th birthday I had a god-damned French test. What the hell is that? Learning how to turn a mouse into a teacup, or how to conjugate the 'avoir' verb in seven different tenses? Sweet Jesus, which one would you fucking choose?
So there I was, 9 years later, watching the Christmas movie 'Elf.' Really very silly, but sweet in a stupid kind of way. I'd watched it a thousand times, and I knew exactly what was going to happen. No surprises.
And then the end bit where New York rises up in an unprecedented showing of Christmas spirit rolled onto screen and I burst into tears. I've never actually had tears splash out of my eyes, but there they were, spritzing my cozy movie blanket.
It was one of those moments where I could have really handled having a boyfriend. Or a regular friend. Shit, I would have sobbed on a dog at that point. Not weeping by myself, wailing into the darkness with nothing but a roll of toilet paper to keep me company. Mom was out of town for a work conference, Dad was dead, and my severe lack of anything that actually resembled a social life boiled down to a very lonely Linnea Jolie wishing magic was real.
That was it. My deepest, darkest, right down to the bones of my bones wish. The world was a terrible, shitty, awful cock-up of vomit blended into a mouldy paste and served with a side of sinus infection and I would have given my left eye for magic to be real. I would have given my entire body if magic was real AND I knew how to use it.
Seeing all those New Yorkers, including that old guy who was the voice of the dad in 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' singing Christmas carols to launch Santa on his annual Magellan ride just made everything come crashing down to stark, harsh reality.
Magic was, without a doubt, NOT real.
It was the only explanation for the way things were in the world.
Nobody that used magic would let the world get to this place. And nobody trying to take over the world WITH magic would be nearly as bad trying to use it.
I blubbed and sobbed until my head hurt, and then kept going until I thought I was drained of every fluid in my body. The movie was over, I missed the whole end bit with the baby, and the last of my ice cream melted. I watched through a fog of misery as Slytherclaw (our cat, and you only get one guess what our dog's name was) slinked out from under the couch to lap away at my rocky road.
"It's not fair, is it, Slytherclaw?" I wiped my nose on my sleeve, which only made my sleeve snotty and my nostrils burn. "If this was a fair world, you'd be talking back to me by now!"
Cats were in a category of their own when it came to the animal kingdom. They were lizards with fur, and showed their buttholes way too much with that whole tail-straight-up-in-the-air move they did. Slytherclaw's favorite spot to puke was right beside the toilet in the middle of the night, which had made for some choice shrieks by yours truly during midnight pee runs. Nothing quite like warm cat barf squishing between your toes when you haven't turned on the light to piss.
No, there just wasn't any magic in the world, and that's what made that part in 'Elf' so very tragic for me. I could believe in magic with every ounce of my being, every scrap of my willpower, and pray to every god that was listening to teach it to me, but that just didn't change the fact that I was a sad 20-year-old woman clinging to a dream that would never, ever come true.
"That does it, Slytherclaw." I picked up the rotund cat and got a hairy eyeball for my efforts. "Starting tomorrow, I don't believe in magic anymore."
And you know what? I was this close to actually believing myself.
YOU ARE READING
Extra Lemon
FantasyLinnea Jolie has been waiting since she was a little girl for magic to be real. Time and time again, she has been shown that it isn't, and she is devastated by the horrible admission that the world is just not magical. Until one fine day, with just...
