Unicorns

When I was six, I wrote a poem for my mum's birthday. It was all about a unicorn, that danced - yes, danced - in a ferny glen (and God can only guess where I got the word 'glen' from at the age of six), where dragons slept and mortal men lay round a cave of treasures gold ('Alas! But they had been so bold/ To step where fairies dance at night...'). It went down very well - I believe my mother cried - and today it serves to remind me of three important things: 1. that mothers like anything you give them, 2. that poems - like songs - are a wonderfully cheap gift for any occasion (and can be recycled with no effort: see Elton John and Candle in The Wind), and 3. six year olds who write poems about ferny glens don't tend to have many friends.

I didn't sit down this evening to write a blog about unicorns, however. I didn't sit down to write a blog about my mum (or any other member of my much maligned family, for once). I didn't sit down to write about Elton John, and I didn't sit down to write about poetry.

I sat down to write about love. 

And I couldn't do it; I never can. The closer I get to the topic, the harder the writing is, and the more embarrassed I become. When I was six, I sat down to compose a poem that would tell my mum how much I loved her, and what I ended up with was an eight line ditty about a horse with a spike coming out of its head. I sat down to tell her happy birthday, and - instead - I told her about goblins who apparently induced group comas. Instead of focusing on how I felt, I focused on something that wasn't - and never could be - real, simply because the closer things get to the heart of you, the deeper the splinter is, and the harder it is to pull it out.

The truth is that love scares me. It scares me like nothing else does; and the feeling I get when I'm even close to it - the feeling of inadequacy, of vulnerability, of raw fear, of knowing that the only weapon I really have against the world (writing) is defunct because it can never really cover it, not really - makes me want to write about unicorns forever simply because they're not real, and they don't scare me, and I can go some way to catching them. Which love will never let me do: not properly. My words - my tweezers - just aren't strong enough, and the love breaks off somewhere in me: stuck and hurting and making it difficult to walk properly. 

Tonight I wanted to write about love because I think I am falling for somebody (I know this, because I am terrified, and I can't think of a lot else, and his initials are on my pencil case). But every time I sit down to try and write about it - or to try and tell him - I can't. The unicorn pops up again. I am utterly inadequate, suddenly, and I can write about anything - I can write about jam tarts; I can write about dancing; I can wax lyrical about stars and sparkles and rainbows and so forth - but I cannot say how I actually feel, and I cannot admit my weakness, or my fear, publicly. I can't blog about it: I'm too embarrassed. I can't tell my friends about it: I'm too shy. I cannot confess that I'm exposed: both emotionally, and in my writing. Not without freezing, or losing all of my words entirely, or feeling as if my writing is broken and I have nothing of any value to offer him anymore.

The problem is that boys aren't so big on unicorns. Ferny glens are not that impressive, and I'm not sure a rhyming fairy circle has ever made a man cry (apart from maybe Tolkien, and possibly Keats: he always struck me as the wussy type). My attempts to dodge the topic, therefore, are becoming more and more inadequate, and - even more importantly - the older I get, and the more rigid my fear of love and my inability to write about it grows, the more dangerous it becomes. The closer I get to buying a cat and a bedsit and a blanket that smells of car.

So I sat down tonight to write about love, and - 21 years later, 21 years wiser - I wrote about unicorns again. I wrote about something imaginary, instead of taking a deep breath and trying to deal with real life, and real emotions, instead.

But - if I can get this far - there's nothing to say that I'm not on my way to being able to write about it properly, or confront it properly. Because they're not so different, unicorns and love: not really. They're both pretty from a distance, and they can both spike you through the middle if you get too close. And they're both pretty magical, as long as you can make yourself believe in them.