by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Hot Chocolate for the Unicorn and Other Flights of Fancy
Ever since my fortieth birthday, I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality. What happens when we die? Is there anything waiting for us on the other side of the veil, or is this life all we have? The thoughts catch me when I’m alone; when it’s late at night; or even sometimes right in the middle of a chaotic day, rushing around with my kids on errands.
Once as I was trying to fall asleep, I wondered what it would feel like to be dead — would it be like a dreamless sleep? And suddenly, it felt like my mind — which is far too good at imagining things for its own good sometimes — stepped backwards off a cliff. It felt like falling — not being dead, that is, but trying to imagine something that I literally can’t imagine. Like trying to see the back of your own eyes.
I don’t often face things I can’t imagine.
* * *
My sister invited me and my family to join her and her husband at the beach house. One of our aunts own it, and we’ve both gone there off and on since we were kids. But not at the same time, not for years anyway. We haven’t even spoken in years, not until today when we all arrived, parked on the grassy turf between salal bushes in front of the house and started unpacking.
My kids are old enough now that they can mostly take care of themselves on a trip like this — pack a bag, claim a bed in one of the drafty bedrooms, and then either hit the beach or hang out in the living room playing one of the beat up old board games. Maybe reading a really old paperback. There’s such an eclectic collection, sporadically updated when visitors to the house leave a new book behind. I don’t know if I’d have ever read Steve Martin’s memoir if I hadn’t happened upon a copy here, and it was a really good read. On the other hand, some of the books are downright cringe-worthy, like the book of sanctimonious parables my dad used to insist on reading out loud to us when we were little. That book is simply awful, and of course, it’s still here. This whole place is like a time capsule.
My sister and I play Bananagrams on the kitchen table, each solitarily building our little castles out of words, barely speaking, and I wonder: doesn’t she want to catch up? Doesn’t she want to hear anything and everything about my life from the years we’ve been estranged? But she doesn’t ask questions. She doesn’t volunteer stories from her own life. Instead, we laugh lightly about the silly words we can spell with our Bananagram tiles and keep it polite. Everything is polite and distanced.
I guess, it’s better than feeling like I have no sister at all. But it’s strange to me that this seems to be all she wants, getting noticeably uncomfortable whenever I gently try for more.
* * *
I waited seven years for our paths to come together again. I always knew my story and my sister’s story weren’t done with each other yet. We grew apart — violently, angrily, resentfully, both feeling like the other one was too much like our dad, who neither of us can trust. And it took this long for us to come together again, for us to each want the other one back enough that we’re willing to spend our time together in a sort of quasi-silence, biting our tongues, trying to enjoy each other’s company in a physical way — each of us is a warm animal in a room near the other, and we’re not fighting. But we aren’t talking either, not really. Like two cats sitting with their backs to each other, each with their ears skewed in annoyance, keenly aware of the other cat’s presence and mad about it, yet doing nothing to change the situation. That’s a kind of love, isn’t it?
Maybe this is as good as we can do now. Maybe it’s the best we’ll be able to do for the rest of our lives, and maybe, I can be okay with that.
But while we walk together on the beach, commenting only on simple things like the weather, I find my mind wandering, screaming to talk to someone, to truly connect…
…and I begin to see flashes of friends who I remember from a long time ago. Friends who I haven’t needed in a while, as my life has been too busy, too chaotic to allow them space:
A bright white Unicorn prancing in the foamy edge of the surf, his cloven hooves dancing through thinned out waves. And a dragon as dark as obsidian curled up in the hot sand, sunning like a lizard on a rock, only so much bigger, so much grander.
* * *
After everyone else has gone to bed, I sit at the kitchen table, staring at the jumble of Bananagram tiles and holding a warm mug of lemon tea. I’ve laid two more mugs out in front of me. Both empty. All the mugs here are shades of brown with a mottled texture, almost like they’d been made by a novice at working with clay. I think they’re older than I am. One of the empty mugs is filled with hot chocolate, topped with whipped cream and mini-marshmallows. The other is filled with ginger tea that’s as real as any tea that ever graced a child’s tea party with her stuffed animals and dolls.
I’m casting a summoning spell. Bringing my friends back to me. But they’re more distant now than they used to be. Even with their mugs here, waiting for them, they don’t come to the table to sit down. They keep walking beside the ocean, too far away to see through a darkened window. But I can hear them.
I close my eyes and listen to the voices in my head. Tonight, they’re talking about me.
* * *
The Dragon places one curved talon in front of the other, strolling along beside the waves in a steady line while the Unicorn dances beside him, in and out of the rolling waves, back and forth between the water and sand, along an ever-shifting scalloped path.
“You’re the stories she tells,” the Dragon rumbles, “and I’m the story telling her. I’m the darkness she sees when she closes her eyes, and you’re the pictures she draws on it. The last time her eyes close, I’ll be there for her, waiting to enfold her in my wings forever.”
“What about me? What happens to me then?”
“Maybe she’ll bring you with her.”
“I’ll be enclosed inside a dragon’s wings? Forever?”
“My wings. Would that be so bad?”
The Unicorn looks at the Dragon, stilling his frenetic dance. The underside of the Dragon’s wings are as dark as a starless night. “No,” he says. “But maybe…” The Unicorn tries to imagine the world going on without him. Without her. (Without me.)
I’m the best thing in the Unicorn’s world, and that’s not arrogance on my part. I’m what imagined him into being, what made the world worthwhile and anchored him to it. Without me, the Unicorn wouldn’t exist at all.
Without me, though, the world will continue to exist, but it will be missing something necessary. Something that makes it better. More worthwhile. (At least, I’d like to think so.)
And the Unicorn is part of me. The best part of me. That isn’t arrogance on the Unicorn’s part — it’s what I believe about myself.
“No,” the Unicorn says. “I think I’ll have to stay behind. It’s what she would want me to do.” He’d have to find a way to prance through other people’s minds and be seen by other people’s eyes.
“You’d abandon her?” the Dragon asks pointedly, superciliously, almost angrily. Definitely aggressively. “Stay in a world she can’t be in anymore?”
The Unicorn lowers his head until his horn almost touches the ground. The magic from his horn pushes the grains of sand aside around its glowing point, drawing a line along the beach as they walk side by side. He whickers in his softest voice: “She’ll still have you.”
“And what will you do here, all alone?” the Dragon asks, almost gently. They are best friends after all. “I won’t be here anymore. Not without her.”
“I’ll do my best,” the Unicorn says bravely, “to make sure she’s remembered.”
* * *
I shove the Bananagrams tiles aside, arrange my laptop on the kitchen table between the three mugs — two empty and one with a single sugary sip of lemon tea left at the bottom — open up a Word document and begin to type.
I write down everything. Every thought crossing my mind, every thought I’ve been collecting like shiny pebbles from the beach since arriving here, or maybe just the ones I can still remember. And then I begin to write down the echoing words of the voices I still hear. The voices of my friends as they continue to walk — silky soft and milky white beside glass hard and night sky black — along the beach. I can almost see them now, even though I’m not looking through the window anymore.
The Dragon’s scales reflect the stars from the sky, and the Unicorn glows with his own gentle light. The Unicorn is innocence; the Dragon world-weariness. They’ve both been with me for almost as long as I can remember.
That’s right; I was a world-weary child, and underneath all the shells I’ve learned to build around myself, all the times I’ve had to harden my heart, deep inside, I’m still innocent as a grown-up. I still believe that if I pour my heart out — regardless of all the times my cries have gone unanswered — someone will hear me. Someone will understand.
Maybe it won’t be my sister or even my husband and children when we all unwind from this trip. Maybe it will be someone who reads these words long after I’m gone and the words on this page are all that’s left of me. Maybe it’s you, and maybe, even though we’ve never met, you can see from these words that I would understand you too. Two waves, separated by the wall of time, washing across the same shore.
Can you see them? Can you see the Unicorn and the Dragon walking together beside the sea?
* * *
“Can we keep doing this when she’s gone?” the Unicorn asks.
“You mean, keep walking on the beach together?” The Dragon grows translucent, like a reflection on a window, completely at the mercy of the angle of the light. Like a quantum particle whose state depends on being observed or Tinkerbell in Peter Pan who needs children to clap for her, he only exists when someone looks at him. “As long as you stay,” the Dragon answers, “we may keep doing it forever.”
The Unicorn nods his head, trying to understand what the Dragon has said. But he is only a simple Unicorn. Sweet, good, and hopeful. Like a reflection on the glassy surface of a still pond — only as deep as the pond itself, and completely at the mercy of ripples — he only understands enough to be charming, to ask questions, to draw out the stories in me that will only be told if I know someone is listening.
The Unicorn will always listen. He loves stories, and he’s one of my favorite stories to tell.
Some ponds are mere puddles, fated to dry up when the sun comes out or be splashed into incoherent chaos by rubber boots and tire treads. But some ponds might as well be oceans. Everlasting. Longer lived than those who play beside them.
This moment — as the Dragon and Unicorn walk together beside the crashing and ebbing waves, leaving neither hoof prints nor talon prints in the sand — is only a moment. And like every moment, it is an eternity unto itself for as long as it is happening.
The Unicorn draws in a deep breath. The coastal air smells sweet.
* * *
The waves crash against the shore, one after another, like the pages of a book turning. They’ll keep turning, long after I’m no longer here to listen to them. Long after the Dragon has folded me up in his wings and the Unicorn has left me behind, the waves will still crash. And other people will turn pages.
Maybe these pages.
The Dragon is mortality. The Unicorn is a dream of immortality. The Dragon is reality. But the Unicorn… is the hope for something better.
Maybe someday, after the last one of my pages has turned, while the waves still crash, the Unicorn will become yours.
Read more from Hot Chocolate for the Unicorn and Other Flights of Fancy:
[previous]