The Magic If

They told her it wouldn’t be possible.

They told her it couldn’t be done, that it was a fantasy. She would fail, they said, and she would be humiliated.

She didn’t fail.

It wasn’t clear to anyone how she did it. If truth be told, even she wasn’t sure exactly how it had happened, because again, it shouldn’t have been possible. Even she knew that. But she had tried anyway. Possibly because everyone had told her it couldn’t be done. She felt safe in the knowledge of the impossibility of success.

But even though she couldn’t tell “how it had happened,” she had a pretty good idea of how it (could have) happened. She had seen a possibility, under certain preconditions, if specific things had happened in a specific order beforehand, if specific people had specific tastes or if specific people with specific tastes had been in certain roles or positions, she had figured, in the most precise of ways, that there was some possibility.

It had been slim, but she had imagined it.

So she couldn’t help but think there might have been something more to it than imagination.

She started to think about other things that people thought were impossible, things that weren’t satisfying, things that were needed but couldn’t be had, or got. She started thinking about all of the ways thing scould be different, and what would be necessary to bring them about. She thought about the biggest problems the way an architect might think about a building, from the ground up. She mined the answers to every single why not and for every facet of every answer, she asked back how?

And then she found answers. And then she changed the world.