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You arrived like a unicorn soft-hooved, glimmering, with a mane stitched from stars. I blinked, unsure, certain at first my eyes had conjured you from the fog of loneliness that coils around me like old smoke.

I have spent too long offering myself to the world only to be left with empty hands, palms smudged with soot from promises burned away.

I don’t know how to let you close. I have learned the shape of silence, the brittle edge of polite decline, the way a smile can fracture into absence.

And yet you stand here, a creature of legend, bright horn catching the fractured light of a dawn I almost forgot how to hope for.

Why would you come to me? My body is all wrong angles from building walls no one climbed, my voice splinters when I try to sing, my heart has been tucked away like a brittle moth pinned behind glass.

But you flick your tail, patient, soft eyes catching mine like you see past the ashes and the scars, like you would stay until I remember how to reach out, until I remember how to believe that maybe I too can be something magical in the presence of a friend.