unicorns vs. centaurs ; reality bites

topic of the day: letting reality hit you like a ton of bricks and hope to still be standing after the fact.

i have wanted to be a unicorn from the tender age of three, when my father won a tawdry enamel plaque of one for me at the fair. i became obsessed with them, unhealthily. which worsened when my mother made the mistake of renting 'the last unicorn,' an animated feature with the voice of mia farrow, which i rented every weekend for the next seven years. a cataclysmic mistake on her part, i would cry and bang my fists and feet on the floor, protesting to her, "no, we just rented it every weekend for the last five months, why don't you try something new. Sleeping Beauty?" -wails grow louder - "Cinderella?" - people whispering - "This is ridiculous. The rescuers?" -displays being knocked down - And with one final kick, the movie was in my hand and my mother was pulling me out of the store. it would have been much easier for her just to buy it for me, but i think she liked hanging it over my head if i misbehaved, which was every day. didn't clean my room; no mythical forest. don't want to do the dishes? no magic-tipped sparkly horn. my mother was a very smart woman.

i owned unicorn books and legends, plaques and pictures and stuffed animals. i played games by myself about the fairies and gnomes and talking trees that befriended me, the most beautiful unicorn of them all, and about the dark forces that threatened the good magical forest creatures. i was a "unicorn" for halloween one year by my mother's hand, and i put that in quotations because it almost never happened. it almost never happened because my mother, though an artist at heart, was unable to appropriately costume me as according to my imagination, which was obviously very detailed in it's individual semantics. i do not consider a cardboard paper towel roll a majestic magic horn, nor were the tinsel silver streamers she stuck out the back of the white sheet ( which she somehow confused as an equestrian body) congruent to the bundle of tail on the glorious creature's hindquarters. my ass looked like a party favor after new years eve at tommy lee's house - wilted.
i trick or treated that halloween.
but i wasn't damn happy about it.

so anyway... unicorns. love 'em. think it's great that they can just be reclusive and beautiful in the same breath. they just hung out with their forest friends and had some good downtime. cool off in a waterfall, lay down in the shade, prance in fields of daisies... that sort of thing. everything i've ever wanted to have in life, BAM. unicorn. done.

i'm aware now that this will never happen. with the economic recession so far along in it's pregnancy, who knows what the price of daisies are? and magic horn cleaners? forget about it. that shit's expensive, and they only carry it in whole foods. the point is, i had to grow out of my delusions that i was one day going to be a mythical forest trademark. the same way i had to understand i was never going to be a five foot, 90 pound ballerina or a harvard doctorate scholar. there's a certain reality to these things, and they loom over our heads and on the back of our minds while we are lying to ourselves. at best, after all these years, i could really only exist as a centaur, just for the simple fact that i could at least still score some dates with humans without wondering if they only ever wanted me for my horn.

you know?

k.