I wept all the way from Dingwall to Glasgow; as I told my friends, there were no gasps or quaking shoulders, just streams of broken fable flowing down my face. You watched when I split myself open and pulled out the essence of my being: the good, the bad, thoughts and memories, metaphors and mythos.

I gave you everything in my being and I asked you to be gentle, and you told me that I was beautiful. I was worthwhile. I was smart and fun, valuable, even treasured. You wanted my heart, you wanted my life.

You were always witty, funny, eloquent. Technical. Fascinating. You looked at me with the most heart-rending smirk when you were joking with me, you looked into my soul when we conversed. I could give you nothing less than everything, and I watched you blossom from fragile vulnerability, tragic victimization, into a vital and confident man with each of what seemed like inconsequential reassurances.

You told me I was beautiful, down to my essence. Then you changed your mind.

The Unicorn is representative of all that is mystical, fleeting, and ephemeral; a peripheral glimpse of glee and glory in the mist of memory; that sense of almost "getting it" just before whatever "it" was slips away; silent hopes and vows you know how to keep without speaking them.

She can be hunted, trapped -- forgotten -- she can even be killed if she leaves her forest, but she does not vanish.

I will now describe how I differentiate faith and suspension of disbelief.

I do not prescribe to any form of absolute faith or belief as it were; these terms suggest the preference of willful denial or ignorance in the face of contrary evidence, which is why these are not an alternate form of knowledge.

Faith is blind by nature, because it cannot continue to be faith if proven, and will not be believed if disproof is accepted. Proof creates knowledge, which trumps faith.

Science, while the only clearly reliable way to explain our world, is not a suitable way to express our experience of it. Thus the conundrum: how can we express ourselves without taking part in willful ignorance, denial, and dogma?

The only ways I have so far recognized are through various forms of mythos, symbolism, iconography. Fiction.