Here's how magic works

It's a kind of magic. The kind that involves places of power. Related to druids, as I understand them. (Which is my favorite D&D class.)

I've lived in my apartment since 2004. I know it, every creak and crook and cranny of it. The microwave oven that can be opened at the exact instant in between the timer running out and the alarm sounding. The flaking chrome on the kitchen tap that can cut your hands if you're careless. The balcony door that was installed only last year but that no one but me can get open. The deepest, darkest corner in the hallway that's still bright enough to read a book in summer.

You get a feeling for your surroundings that goes deeper than any conscious, verbal level. If I hear a sound from something falling over down the street outside on the opposite side of the building from my open window, I turn directly toward that sound without thinking and look into the wall between me and it - I literally hear the sound coming from the exact location of its source.

And, here's what got me thinking about this. My fridge door has an oddly placed center of balance. Nothing I've ever thought about in words. I just know in my bones where that balance is, so I can push it closed with just enough force that it will gently fall closed. It takes like three or four seconds, if it's fully opened. But I can just give it that tiny push and leave it and get on with my life and trust that it closes. Sometimes I look back and see it balanced perfectly still, open about 25 centimeters, and I give it a theatrical nod and it closes the rest of the way.

To anyone looking, it would seem like magic.

Actually, it brings to mind a little story. Bear with me as this post turns from an observation to a rambling collection of anecdotes. You're the only one I can talk to for more than 240 characters, dear reader.

I used to live in a house in the country with my mom, stepdad, stepbrother and (after 1992) my half brother. It was a nice place. Such enormous spaces. The house had two floors, a crawl-space attic, a basement with a dirt floor, a shack for firewood for the furnace and various garden furniture, a tiny building without doors or windows for storing oil (also for the furnace), a small greenhouse, a large two-car garage with a basement, a couple of potato fields, rose bushes, ancient birches, alders and rowans, and even a dense old forest in the back yard filled with the most random old junk ranging from red steel dinner plates to a moss-covered tractor skeleton. Three thousand square meters of fun, which we rented for approximately 400 dollars American per month.

Good times. But to get to the point, the phones. (It was the mid-1990s, our house had a phone line. We usually had three or four phones connected to it. We honestly had a rotary dial phone, though it was an embarrassing relic and I got to destroy it one day when we replaced it with a wireless.) The phone in the living room for some reason made a loud clicking noise when someone called, several seconds before anything started ringing. Well, I always thought it was loud, but.

This one time I for some reason was playing host to my friend M. and several of his friends who I only vaguely knew. I think we might have been having a sleepover and had converged on using my house as my enormous room could fit us all. Four or five teenage boys (I mean, we all thought I was a boy at the time) having some good clean fun. We were sitting in the living room, nominally watching a movie or something, when the phone clicked. I got up from my spot on the couch in the corner and walked across the room to the big desk at an even pace, getting some very odd looks, though I wasn't being strange enough to interrupt the conversation. When I slowly reached my hand out and picked up the phone the moment it rang, however, the room went dead quiet.

I have never fought so hard to keep a straight face, though I think the caller was still pretty confused by the laughter in my voice.

M. was the only one who knew what was going on, but even he thought I was a wizard, I think. It was understood between us that he was the one who knew people and I was the one who knew everything else. He once said of me, to a large group of kids, "He doesn't say much, but when he does, you listen. And he did. He listened to me when I told him what videogames to buy, when I told him Harry Potter was a ripoff of The Books of Magic (which I believed until I read it), when I told him masonry was a good career where you'd always find work (seriously, this guy changed schools because of what I said), when I told him to suck my dick. He listened to me when I told him to not go out and beat up immigrants on the street, though if he had also listened to me when I told him immigrants were not, as a group, bad people we might still be friends.

I mean, probably not. He thought friends should not discuss topics they disagreed on (like immigrants). He thought my Asperger diagnosis was a scam, a hustle to get me disability money; I don't think he could have accepted being friends with someone different from the tiny boxes he needed people to fit into. I would be scared for my safety if I told him I was transgender when in the same room as him.

I've been trying to think of a way to wrap up this post since before the phone thing. Maybe we'll just stop here.