By Amanda Knox

Maybe it’s the Peter Pan production I saw recently, the image of the lost boys clapping Tinkerbell back to life. Or maybe it’s the almost-Spring weather, the sky like an infant’s face, sometimes fresh and cheerful and bright, sometimes clouded over by a stormy tantrum, and in-between, a gray-white calm.

Whatever it is, I think about a particular place, one of my childhood secret places. It was a narrow passage between the back of my house and the chain link fence surrounding my neighbor’s yard. The fence was penetrated and overgrown with thick lilac bushes. We didn’t go back there much unless to tend to the wild strawberries growing in a small patch behind the garage. Mom didn’t mow because it was out of the way and the ground was uneven, so the grass stalks were thick, flat, reached up to my waist, and accumulated dew. What with the back of the house and the lilac canopy and the spider webs, the potato bugs balling in my cupped palms, sometimes it was dark and spooky, and Deanna and I dared each other to run in and retrieve handfuls of the leaves that resembled banana chips which we pretended to eat. Other times the sun was just at the right angle of ascent or descent to illuminate the tunnel, the air sparkled with spiraling particles, and it felt like that secret place didn’t belong to the world of humans and real things, but to creatures I read about and wanted to believe in—fairies.

Once, in the morning when the light was just right, I wandered in there alone. It was tempting, the silence ringing. I really wanted something to happen, something like the beginning of stories I’d read, a wardrobe full of furs opening up to a snowy wood. I wanted the fairies to recognize my childhood innocence, and choose to reveal themselves. My steps were tentative, gently rustling the grass. And then, through the leaves of the canopy, a flash of light.

Of course I knew it could have been—was most likely—the sun. I knew I could have imagined it, even. I was just old enough to be aware that there were some things I knew to be true, some things I believed to be true, and some things I wanted to be true. I had realized by this time, for instance, that people believed in God, and that believing in God wasn’t like knowing that three times three is nine by clustering dried beans on your desk. I also knew that Santa Claus was not real, that my family had instilled this belief in me because it was fun. And since realizing it was not true, I wondered about believing, if I could believe because I wanted to believe, or because it made my sister happy to believe with me, or because it made my family happy to think I believed.   

I never told anyone about the that flash of light, the fairy. Not even Deanna, who I told everything, especially this type of thing. I felt joy and wonder at what I had seen. I felt special. But I also worried I was pretending. And while it felt good to believe in something I wanted to believe in, I knew I couldn’t hang the weight of examination and explanation on myself and my pretend belief, that the real world would rip my fairy apart like tissue paper. So I let that flash of light exist as a private emotion in a warm place between make-believe and knowledge. A place for beliefs, fantasies, dreams, desires, and fairies, existing only so far as the edges of my heart, existing just enough and not at all.