Why I'm Still Searching for Unicorns After All These Years (And Finding Them Occasionally in Jewelry)
Stacey Bowers
“Each time I see the unicorns, my unicorns, it is like that morning in the woods and I am truly young, in spite of myself.” - King Haggard, The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
You’re never too old to stop loving (and maybe even believing!) in unicorns. I have loved unicorns my entire life. Some of my earliest memories are of playing with collectible unicorn toys and watching The Last Unicorn repeatedly until my eyeballs about burned out of my head from staring at the flames of the Red Bull and the swinging teats of the harpy.
I fell in love with reading books about unicorns. Be kind. Be patient. Be brave. Be alert. Be pure of heart. Believe. Good things will come… That’s what you can read between the lines of unicorn stories. Most stories about unicorns (and horses, now that I’m thinking about it), center around a strong girl lead.
I read and reread Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn until I could recite whole chunks of it. Mary Stanton’s Unicorns of Balinor series is the most underrated YA book series in history, in my opinion, and I have yet to meet another person who has read it. I once got sassy with a poorly-informed bookseller at Books-A-Million when, after I asked her if the store carried any nonfiction books about unicorns, she LAUGHED IN MY CHILD FACE and told me unicorns aren’t real. Jokes on you, you old hag. There are dozens of nonfiction books about the mythology of unicorns that spans continents and centuries, and a bunch of those books are at my house now, no thanks to you. Bruce Coville’s Into the Land of the Unicorn book series inspired me to wear crystal amulets around my neck and ponder jumping off of rooftops to see if I’d land in a unicorn world.
In so many ways I did live in a unicorn world growing up. Unicorns were all I thought about. I was completely obsessed. I was a 10-year-old unicorn historian who probably could have authenticated some museum-quality unicorn artifacts. Every page of every school notebook was bordered with unicorns drawings: unicorn profiles, unicorns rearing, unicorns resting in the grass, baby unicorns at their mothers’ sides. Drawing really good unicorns is still my best party trick and my favorite thing to do that blows kids’ minds.
Several years later (I’ll let my professed favorite reading material age me), here I sit, wearing a unicorn-patterned shirt and unicorn earrings. The earrings are some of my own design, and it still tickles me every time I sneak a unicorn into my handmade jewelry. It feels like all that time drawing and collecting unicorns paid off in a way that parents think things pay off—with literal money.
I don’t think about unicorns 26 hours of the day anymore. Unfortunately, I had to grow up at some point, and growing up means thinking about paying bills, cooking my own dinners, whether or not the 10,000 anxieties that have divided like cells in my body over all these years should be wrestled with tonight or held at bay with a vodka tonic, if we’re out of cat litter again. But I still think about unicorns.
They’re harder to find these days. Even if I never saw one with my wide open eyes, perpetually scanning the neighborhood creeks and forested backyards of suburban Arkansas, I could always see them when I closed my eyes. I didn’t need to jump from a roof to get to their world. I could open a book and completely disappear inside of it. And there they were.
Sometimes, when it feels like a mound of pebbles has been stacked stone by stone onto me with out my realizing it until it becomes hard to breathe, I close my eyes and imagine the feeling of being 10 again and believing with everything in me that unicorns are all around me, they just aren’t ready to be seen. If I could bottle that feeling, I would. If I could trap it in an ocean and watch it come in and out with the tide every day, maybe I’d be the next King Haggard.