There is a moment in life when the curtain lifts and what once felt enchanting becomes ordinary. The mystery fades, the sparkle dulls, and the magic disappears. This is the effect of reality. It strips illusions down to their practical parts. What once felt like wonder becomes mechanics. What once inspired awe now looks like a process to be managed, a structure to be maintained.

As children, everything feels magical. The world is full of possibilities. Love feels perfect. Success looks inevitable. The future is wide open. But as we grow up, we begin to see the strings behind the puppet. We notice the flaws in the people we once admired. We see that every ideal comes with compromise, effort, and disappointment. The dream job is just a job. The fairy tale relationship is filled with hard conversations and unmet expectations. The thing we longed for turns out to be messy, fragile, or fleeting.

This is not necessarily because those things aren’t beautiful or meaningful, but because reality requires attention to detail. Magic doesn’t ask questions. Reality does. Magic lets you float. Reality pulls you back down. And in that process, the charm of things often dissolves.

Yet there’s a deeper question underneath: does reality truly kill the magic, or does it only kill the illusion? Sometimes, what we call magic is simply not knowing better. Once we learn the truth, it doesn’t feel special anymore because it no longer surprises us. But maybe the problem is not with the truth, but with our expectation that magic should never be touched by truth.

Still, it’s undeniable. Knowing how a trick works changes how it feels. Seeing the effort behind a performance makes it more human and less mystical. Falling in love with someone’s real self is less dramatic than the fantasy, but more honest. It’s possible to appreciate what’s real, but it won’t feel the same as the spell of not knowing.

Reality is necessary. It grounds us. It protects us from getting lost in false hopes. But it also costs us something. It takes away the shimmer that makes things feel bigger than life. And for many, that loss feels like grief.

So we wrestle with it. We learn to find meaning where magic used to be. In the effort, in the truth, in the imperfections. But we don’t forget that once, before we understood, it all felt magical. And sometimes, we still miss that feeling.