Shadow Puppet Storyteller

My Unicorn Journal

Maybe forty-five is too old to admit a childhood / early Eighties-era weakness for unicorns and rainbows. I had a collection of unicorn items that grew from my preteens through about age twenty, and that I kept long after most might have chucked it all. I think the 1994 Northridge Quake dampened a portion of my desire for collecting altogether. The glass and plaster items lost the ground war, we'll just say.

But for just as long a time I had been a writer, and one of my very favorite items was a journal. It has been away from my sight for about twelve years. I truly do not know if it awaits my rediscovering it in a box, or if it became lost upon moving in 2000. It became one of those creative items I could obsess over. The art was beautiful, and left open to allow its user to embellish -- yes, a coloring book. In its pages, which became an extension of me and my blossoming adult life, are deeply personal observations, essays and poetry. Although the best feature of this hardbound unicorn journal was the varied pen drawings of unicorns on pages and spreads, the highlight was that I had taken much care in hand-coloring my favorite pages in various media. Some pages had my own sketches in addition to a poem.

In thinking I may never recover this book, I am thinking about the first line of a poem I wrote about acknowledging deep love for another. It is accompanied by a sketch of a man and woman in an embrace. Makes me a little sad to think I cannot remember the words I wrote, expect for the initial few, yet I'd swear I remember the rhythm!

Don't look up
There's love in those eyes
So much -da-
-da-
da-da-da-da-da-da
da-da-da
da-da-da-da-da-da

And the other challenge is to be honest with myself (and anyone who may read my blog) about what I wrote, why I wrote it, and how it could still be a touchstone of a life moment even when I cannot pull the exact date nor inspired words back into focus. Even as I write this, I believe that I have described my feelings about this moment elsewhere in writing. But I doubt that it is an early blog entry. I have not allowed myself this level of personal transparency often in my writing.

Now I see how important the willingness to declare ideas and feelings are. I do still hide and cautiously monitor most of what I express. It pre-dated any use of Internet, so you need to understand that it did not have the potential of a world stage. Yet, as a writer, this journal was not quite private -- it was something I wanted others to see and read -- in fact, from a rejection point of view, that willingness was more courageous. I made a poetic declaration of love in high school which I later borrowed from in a more professional story's character description. That was a baby-step in which I learned how to incorporate personally expressed poetic form into fictional description.

So, based fully in an actual life experience, the entry in the unicorn journal was BIG too. What I wrote, this one little part of that journal, was an emotional declaration too. But it had more to do with a very young me confronting a perception: the romantic love I would deny myself in favor of the rewards of fidelity and honoring the serendipity of friendship. So confident was our friendship in that night, I could sit across from him and talk about a trauma, and also state my realization of love for him. I felt that love walked hand in hand with a deep gratitude for him. Part of me aches right now, hoping that I always let him know my gratitude for our friendship. I paint it in my mind as such a pure moment, his simple acceptance. Of what I recall, however, I think he really kind of needed me to repeat what I had said. Then when he stepped to the door to leave, we embraced. The difference in our height never seemed more apparent to me than in that moment. This is where the poem's moment is launched -- "Don't look up..."

The tone of my poem was cautionary, but it was willing to reveal all, just as I had. Placing it in my journal along with a sketch of the embrace, I had become fearless as an author. What a learning moment! The tall, embraceable young man in the sketch had my admiration, I cannot deny it. There's a wickedly romantic side of me that savors those male-female attractions that border on lewdness between siblings -- mysterious fascinations that cause shivers because it feels too right when it is declared wrong. Our lives were diverging, and I think part of me knew it intuitively. The lovely and silly thing that bonded us was having the same birthday. Part of me was fearless based on something as simple as feeling related; it felt like we could never be separated, even if I guessed wrong and said all the wrong things at the worst possible moment.

I call upon that fearlessness again. Even now, I need to become a fearless woman. Safely declare my soul is good, and my love a deep well.