I first knew you by your other, less-specific name, as unicorn.
Which is to say, as a creature of wondrous, near-impossible beauty.
A miracle, so I drew you at the center of a depiction I was prompted to make by my first-grade teacher. This was Catholic school in the Reagan Era in suburban New York. This is when and where and how I learned that you were forbidden.
“They did not have unicorns in the Garden of Eden,” Mrs. McClosky announced. I did not think to wonder at the time who They were, or how she had come to interview them. She wore a brooch and so knew things. I wore saddle shoes and an ill-fitting uniform and vomited in the parking lot every day, in dread of my arrival in that dark space of stone hallways, urgent bells, and seemingly inexhaustible legions of certainty, all certain I was wrong for fearing them.
I thought I knew you, so had been happy about this assignment, the first I had loved since entering school, other than the opportunity to give a staged reading of The Gingerbread Man to my kindergarten class.
You can’t catch me, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!
Later I learned the word myth. As in mythical. Which some would use to mean fake but which I took to mean the real in story. Or the real that is larger than seen.
––And I connected it to this misunderstanding that my first-grade teacher had about you, who while real, were mythical, like The Garden herself. Which naturally led to other questions.
These questions led to others, and one day I was old enough to have learned to no longer give my first answer to the question: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A Unicorn! I had announced.
This was my first opportunity to learn that you were not a valid response where the subject was imagined possibilities. Having reflexively rejected this wholesale, I had to learn again in first grade. And did––learn something, anyway.
Later still, I began to see this I, whoever she was supposed to be, as a sort of mythical creature, possibly imaginary. She lived in dreams, and she lived in the dark. According to most official sources, most of who she was, was categorically forbidden. She was simply too––much of everything unnecessary, this creature.
Learning this was almost too much. I forgot what I could in the name of persistence. For what, I sometimes could not remember. By then I was half dead ––but the other half was living, as are you.
You only needed cover to persist, and space. Foresters removed your cover and trappers set traps in your space. These were not meant for you, specifically. You died in them anyway.
I write this hoping that you will recover. That we may recover––enough forest to protect you in the shadow regions, safely ensconced in the unseen, beyond the range of anyone who comes to count you, beyond the bite of any snare so indiscriminately set that it would capture and kill you in its teeth.
I write this praying that you may continue non-existing for your doubters.
I am not worthy, but believe.
I write this that you heal the rest of me, however well she was supposed to have learned by now, to treat the best of herself as a forbidden creature of mythical fear.
I write that we may live.
I write in the shadows, in whispers, that you may hear me.
And live that I may join you, some forbidden someday.
***
For more about the endangered creature at the center of this piece, consider The Saola’s Battle for Survival on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
