You can't do that

ears after, they were still words she did not speak aloud. It was an area of her mind and memory she’d surrounded in razor wire. She was too old to believe in things. She’d gone to school relentlessly. She’d sought explanations for the unexplainable and laughed unkindly at people who indulged in phrases like “the cosmos.”
​    She’d used her adult life as a strip of sandpaper to wear down any sense of wonder into a dull acceptance that things just were. They are. They always will be. 
    It hadn’t always been so. There was a time. She’d picked her nose and run through grassy fields and stayed up all night and invented secret names for things. She’d believed. And imagined. And dreamed. And spoke. 
    But now, she did not say those words. Abracadabra, Open Sesame, Shazaam. These were silly words for snake oil salesmen. But those words, she would not incant. She would not make room in her life for not knowing. She had given up on the power and magic of three words. Three small words that would open up the sky and cause green slime to fall. 
    Why? What was she afraid of? 
    I don’t know.

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