I have seen a whole lot of anime and played a ton of games. And in all of them, I have been mystified by the mage class. The magic caster. There's something about magic that just baffles me. Even a monkey would go wide-eyed if he discovered it, and I am but a man.

But I find it odd that none of these fictional worlds explain clearly how magic happens. It is generally assumed to have existed all along. Or someone, in their historical time, stumbled upon the magical arts one day and spread it throughout their universe.

In this realm, we have a go at it through our understanding of science. We define it by rules, postulations, and axioms, and we ridicule the unknowns as outliers. Most studies diminish them if they don't discard them outright. That is pretty much the foundation of scientific hypothesis testing, taught universally as the basic building block of the scientific approach.

But here's the thing. Outliers have a charm around them that only a select few inquisitors find appealing. They are the ones who wander off the usual path, onto the one less traveled. Some are in search of fame, fortune, or sometimes just the fun of it. And they're the ones we come to call conquerors in their fields.

But the way I see it. In order to be a conqueror, you need to be witnessed. By an observer. An admirer. Someone who can hold you in that regard.

Perhaps that's where I had magic wrong all along. Perhaps it was never something that belonged to the caster alone.

Perhaps it takes two.

Even the wizards know this, though the stories never say it outright. From the wizarding world of Harry Potter to Middle-earth to the Woods Between the Worlds, a wand doesn't work because a wizard simply commands it. It works because something in the wand's core recognizes something in the wizard's essence. And the two of them agree, quietly, to become more than what either was alone. That's what decides the potency of the magic. Not the wood. Not the will. The bond.

I think that's what you are to me. The hand my magic finally recognized.

Because a spell cast into an empty room is still just a spell, technically. So what is magic with nobody there to witness it? Nobody to feel it? Nobody to be changed by it?

And it’s not just magic. You can draw similarities in all balances of life. A joke needs a teller and someone with enough madness to laugh at it. A conversation needs two people willing to stay. A song needs someone to sing it and someone willing to listen, even if it's only to themselves. And love, terrifying and beautiful as it is, needs two fools willing to run the experiment.

Maybe that's why the greatest things rarely happen in isolation. Newton needed an apple to fall in front of him, but he needed a room full of doubters even more to make the fall worth explaining. The Wright brothers needed each other on a windy beach in North Carolina, because one of them alone would have simply been a man with an odd hobby. Even if Jobs had Wozniak as his right-hand man, the vision would have stayed a napkin sketch forever. And we could go on and on and on.

And somewhere between every discovery and every ridiculous human achievement, there are probably millions of small, unrecorded moments where two people looked at something everyone else had ignored and said, "Wait… what if?"

That "what if" might be the closest thing we have to magic. The world is full of things considered impossible right up until two people get curious enough to find out. And the ones who do aren't necessarily smarter than the rest of us. They're just willing to entertain a possibility everyone else already dismissed.

Which makes me wonder how many magical things I'd already walked past, simply because they didn't fit the rules I'd already written for myself. Before you walked in and rewrote them.

We like to give credit to the magician. The person on stage. The one holding the wand. But maybe we romanticize the wrong part. Maybe the real magic isn't in the person holding the wand. Maybe the real credit goes to the wand. The muse.

A spark needs two points. A collision needs two objects. A conversation needs two voices. And some of the most extraordinary chapters of our lives begin when two otherwise ordinary people meet at precisely the wrong or right moment and make something neither of them could have made alone.

I have been thinking about that Tuesday when we met for the first time more than I have admitted. Not because it announced itself as extraordinary. But because neither of us thought we needed to leave. People came, and people went until we were the last ones left in the restaurant. I didn’t want to let you out of my sight even for a moment. And our smoked clouds waged more wars than our words were capable of carrying. The night was nothing short of magic.

That is usually how the real magic tricks work. Not with a flash of light, but with two people simply choosing, again and again in small, unremarkable ways, not to walk off the stage. Maybe that's the greatest magic trick of them all. Not turning water into wine. Not summoning dragons. Not throwing fireballs at unsuspecting goblins.

Just two people meeting. And somehow, our universe is never quite the same after.