The MAGICK of What the Lie Could Not Take

On hurt, truth, creation, and the things we choose to keep

By April Louann Mitchell

There is a particular kind of hurt that comes from discovering the truth was standing in the room the entire time while someone looked directly at you and chose the lie.

Not confusion.

Not misunderstanding.

Not two people remembering the same moment differently.

A lie.

I have been thinking about what happens after that.

Because hurt has a strange appetite.

It wants attention.

It wants explanation.

It wants you to return to the scene again and again, turning every sentence over like a stone, searching for the exact place where reality changed.

When did it begin?

What else wasn't true?

How could someone say that and look me in the eye?

Did I miss something?

Should I have known?

And perhaps the most exhausting question of all:

Why?

I know something about questions.

Mystic Dragonfly Creations was practically built from them.

I pick things up.

I turn them over.

I photograph them.

I examine their surfaces.

I notice colors, fractures, textures, scars and strange little details that make me wonder whether what I am looking at is really what I first assumed it was.

I research.

I compare.

Sometimes I test.

Sometimes I discover an answer.

Sometimes I discover that my first answer was wrong.

And sometimes, after all of that, I arrive at the three words the Dragonfly Archive has learned never to fear:

I don't know.

There is freedom in those words when you are examining a stone.

There can also be freedom in them when you are examining hurt.

Because eventually I realized something.

There are questions whose answers may help us understand.

And there are questions that become cages.

You can spend an extraordinary amount of your life trying to extract truth from someone committed to protecting a lie.

You can explain.

You can present evidence.

You can replay conversations.

You can point toward what you saw with your own eyes.

You can ask someone to acknowledge the thing sitting plainly between you.

And still—they may choose the lie.

At some point, another question becomes more important.

What is this costing me?

That question changed something.

Because the lie had already taken enough.

I was not going to hand it my curiosity too.

And perhaps that is where MAGICK begins.

I Don't Mean the Kind of MAGICK That Pretends

I want to be careful with that word.

MAGICK.

It is beautiful.

It is old.

It carries mystery.

It carries ritual and imagination and intention and generations of people looking at the world and believing there might be more happening than what is immediately visible.

But MAGICK can become an easy word to hide behind if we are not careful.

So let me tell you what I do not mean.

I do not mean pretending something didn't hurt.

I do not mean putting a pretty spiritual sentence over something ugly and calling it healed.

I do not mean pretending a lie becomes truth because someone repeats it confidently.

I do not mean deciding every coincidence is a supernatural message.

I do not mean throwing imaginary lightning at the person who hurt you.

And I certainly do not mean turning another human being into a villainous character so I can make myself the hero of every story.

Reality is usually more complicated than that.

The Dragonfly Archive has taught me to respect complexity.

What do I know?

What can I observe?

What can I document?

What do I suspect?

What belongs to interpretation?

What belongs to story?

And what remains unknown?

Those questions matter.

They matter when I am looking at a stone.

They matter when I am writing.

They matter when I am hurting.

So when I write MAGICK, I mean something quieter.

Something that does not require reality to disappear.

I mean attention.

I mean intention.

I mean the moment something discarded becomes visible again.

I mean the decision to create when destruction would be easier.

I mean finding beauty without pretending ugliness does not exist.

I mean picking something up that everyone else walked past.

I mean looking at what remains after something has broken and asking:

What can still be made from this?

That kind of MAGICK interests me.

Because I have seen it.

Hurt Wants to Become the Whole Story

Pain has a way of becoming enormous.

When something hurts badly enough, it can move into every room.

You wake up thinking about it.

You make coffee thinking about it.

You drive thinking about it.

You paint while some corner of your mind is still arguing with someone who isn't even standing there.

You write imaginary conversations.

You think of the perfect response three hours too late.

You remember something someone said six months ago and suddenly hear it differently.

You begin rearranging the past because new information changed the way you understand it.

That is one of the strangest things about discovering a lie.

The lie doesn't remain in the moment when you discovered it.

It travels backward.

Suddenly you are looking at old memories asking whether they were standing on solid ground.

That can become consuming.

And hurt loves to convince us that if we think about it long enough, we will eventually reach the answer that makes everything stop hurting.

Sometimes we do learn something important.

Sometimes there is a conversation that needs to happen.

Sometimes a boundary needs to be drawn.

Sometimes a decision has to be made.

But sometimes there is no magical sentence waiting at the end of the investigation.

Sometimes another person made a choice.

And we cannot crawl inside their mind and force an explanation to become satisfying.

That is difficult for someone like me.

I want to understand things.

I want to know what the stone is.

I want to know how it formed.

I want to know why the color changes when it gets wet.

I want to know what that strange line is.

I want to know how an object ended up where I found it.

I want to know.

Curiosity is one of the engines of my life.

But curiosity needs discipline.

Otherwise curiosity becomes obsession.

And there are times when the most disciplined thing we can say is:

I have enough information to know this hurt me.

I do not need to understand every molecule of the hurt before I am allowed to move.

Return to the Object

There is a practice I have learned through the Dragonfly Archive.

When imagination becomes enormous, return to the object.

When excitement becomes enormous, return to the object.

When a theory begins running faster than the evidence, return to the object.

What is actually there?

What can I see?

What can I photograph?

What can I measure?

What can I verify?

That practice has kept me grounded through some very strange discoveries.

It has also begun teaching me something about life.

When hurt becomes enormous, sometimes we need to return to what is actually there.

Not the imagined conversation.

Not what someone might be thinking.

Not the future catastrophe our frightened mind has already written.

Not the hundred possible explanations.

What is here?

Right now?

My hands.

My work.

My paintings.

My books.

My questions.

The things I have created.

The people who have shown up with kindness.

The things that still make me laugh.

A dragonfly moving across the yard.

A strange stone in my hand.

A canvas waiting.

A page waiting.

A story that has not been written yet.

Those things are real too.

Pain does not get to become more real simply because it is louder.

That may be one of the most important things I am learning.

Hurt is real.

But hurt is not the only thing that is real.

The Things a Lie Cannot Own

A lie can take trust.

Sometimes it can take peace for a while.

It can change the way you look at a person.

It can change a relationship.

It can change the future you thought you were walking toward.

It can make you question your judgment.

It can make you angry.

It can make you sad.

It can make you want to tear apart every drawer in the past looking for evidence.

But there are things a lie cannot own unless we surrender them.

My ability to create.

My curiosity.

My imagination.

My voice.

My paintings.

My stories.

My capacity to notice something beautiful.

My willingness to learn.

My ability to change my mind when evidence changes.

My sense of humor.

My stubbornness.

My questions.

The next thing I haven't discovered yet.

Those belong to me.

And when I began thinking about that, naturally, I thought about a stone.

Of course I did.

April picks up rocks.

The Forgotten Stone

Before there was a Dragonfly Archive, there was a stone.

Before there was Ignivar, there was a stone.

Before there was a book series, there was a stone.

Before there were Keepers and Heartstones and flame-born guardians—there was something real.

Something ordinary enough to disappear into the landscape.

It had been there.

I had been near it.

Life had happened around it.

And then one day I looked differently.

That is such a simple sentence.

I looked differently.

But almost everything that followed began there.

I stopped.

I noticed.

I asked:

What is this?

That question became investigation.

Investigation became imagination.

Imagination became story.

Story became a book.

The book became the beginning of The Dragonfly Journals.

And suddenly something that had been overlooked became a doorway into an entire creative world.

There is MAGICK in that.

Not because I need to claim the stone cast a spell.

Not because I need to invent something supernatural about its geological identity.

The stone is allowed to remain a stone.

The MAGICK was also in the noticing.

Something forgotten became visible.

Something ordinary became important because someone finally stopped long enough to look.

I think about that often now.

Especially when I am hurt.

What Have I Forgotten While Looking at the Hurt?

That question makes me uncomfortable.

Which usually means it is worth asking.

When pain demands all our attention, what else disappears?

What part of ourselves have we walked past because we were staring at the wound?

What have we stopped making?

What have we stopped noticing?

What have we stopped planning?

What little piece of ourselves has been sitting quietly in the landscape waiting for us to look again?

Maybe that is a painting.

Maybe it is a friendship.

Maybe it is a business.

Maybe it is a garden.

Maybe it is a book.

Maybe it is a version of ourselves that existed before someone else's behavior became the center of our emotional weather.

Maybe it is simply rest.

There is a terrible temptation after being hurt to make the person who hurt us the main character.

Think about that.

They become the first thought.

Their words become the dialogue.

Their choices determine the mood.

Their behavior drives the plot.

Their explanation becomes the missing final chapter we believe we need before we can move forward.

What an enormous role to give someone.

What if we took the pen back?

Not to rewrite what happened.

That would be another kind of lie.

But to decide what the story is about now.

That feels like MAGICK to me.

MAGICK Is Not Making the Lie Disappear

There are things we cannot paint gold and transform into something lovely.

Some things remain painful.

Some betrayals remain betrayals.

Some endings remain endings.

Some questions remain unanswered.

I do not believe healing requires us to become grateful for every terrible thing.

I do not believe every wound arrived to teach us a lesson.

Sometimes people make selfish choices.

Sometimes people lie.

Sometimes circumstances are unfair.

Sometimes something simply hurts.

The MAGICK is not in pretending otherwise.

The MAGICK is in refusing to let the injury become the only artifact preserved from that period of your life.

What else was there?

What did you make?

What did you notice?

Who loved you?

What did you learn?

What did you refuse to surrender?

What did you begin?

What survived?

What surprised you?

What made you laugh on a day you thought you couldn't?

What did you pick up?

What did you finally put down?

Those belong in the Archive too.

The Archive Keeps Evidence of Survival

Look at the things I am drawn to.

Weathered stone.

Petrified wood.

Fossils.

Mineral fractures.

Objects carrying scars.

Things that spent years underground.

Things whose histories are incomplete.

Things altered by pressure.

Things transformed without becoming meaningless.

I do not love them because they are perfect.

I love them because they contain evidence.

Something happened here.

Time passed here.

Pressure happened here.

Water moved here.

Something fractured.

Something mineralized.

Something survived long enough for me to hold it.

That does not mean I romanticize destruction.

A broken thing did not need to break in order to deserve

THE STORY DOESN’T END HERE

The forgotten stone became a question.
The question became a story.
And the story became The Dragonfly Journals.

If this is your first visit to the Dragonfly Archive, begin where I did:

START WITH IGNIVAR’S HEARTSTONE — BOOK ONE

ENTER THE DRAGONFLY ARCHIVE
EXPLORE THE DRAGONFLY JOURNALS
JOIN ME SEPTEMBER 27 — AFTERNOON TEA WITH THE DRAGONFLY JOURNALS

Some stories begin because someone finally stopped long enough to notice what everyone else walked past.

Maybe yours does too.

— AVRILIS