//------------------------------//
// Wings on the Horizon 
// Story: Wings on the Horizon 
// by The Ranger 
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True friendship. That’s not so easy to come by these days. I should know. Friendship is more than just a mate you hang out with, more than someone that supports you. So much more.

True friendship goes beyond that. Beyond such earthly endeavours. And no matter how hard you try to find it, you rarely do. Just like love, friendship finds you, whether you want it to or not. Maybe that sounds a bit harsh; like saying you can’t escape it.

But why would you want to escape it? Why not embrace it?

Maybe you’re the kind of person who now thinks that having friends is just a burden; maybe you view friendship as something that can be annoying, packed with responsibilities towards these friends. Or perhaps you’re the kind of person who just prefers to be alone without anyone to call friend. Maybe you’re just endlessly running from your own destiny.

Just like friendship and love, you can’t outrun destiny. It always finds you. Least, that’s what I’ve learned throughout my life, and I learned to accept it. Friendship always finds you, one way or the other.

I grew up in a small village in southern England. It wasn’t anything too fancy, just your average town with quaint old houses in grey stonework, covered by moss and ivy. It rested at the bottom of a small valley, surrounded by rolling hills and green fields, and a forest some ways to the south. It was the kind of place you see in the movies, where everyone knows everyone and nothing strange ever happens.

As a child, I loved this place, my home, my own little slice of heaven. I fell in love with everything, and could never dream of moving away or leaving my parents and friends behind.

Just a few weeks after my twelfth birthday, everything changed. My life turned upside-down. It was in September; I got up in the morning and went downstairs to see what mother had made for breakfast. I was hoping for pancakes; mom’s pancakes couldn’t be described with words, and just the thought of them made my mouth water.

Once I entered the kitchen, I was both surprised and disappointed to find it empty; no breakfast, no mom and no dad. I was about to call out when I heard the sounds of a car engine outside. I took a peak out of the window above the kitchen sink. Outside, dad had just started up our car, and the engine was running as he held mom tight in his arms.

I couldn’t see at the time, but now I know just how much they both cried.

Mom wore a bleak yellow summer’s dress, her hair tied into a knot at the back of her head. I could see dad press his face against hers. He was wearing his uniform, and a duffle bag rested on the ground next to him.

I wasn’t quite sure of what was going on when dad drove off into the distance. Or maybe I did. Yes, I knew perfectly well what was going on, but my young mind didn’t want to accept it. When the car disappeared on the horizon, it finally hit me and I broke down into tears.

Mom came running into the kitchen with tears in her face as well. I threw myself into her arms, and she held me as we both cried on the floor of our kitchen. The floor that my father had laid, in the house he’d built. The living room next to the kitchen was decorated with various military memorabilia, including dad’s medals, and a box holding his service gun, an M1911.

Now, both the medals and the gun were gone, just as my father. He’d told me that we’d never see another war again, at least not in my lifetime, and I believed him.

And now he was gone. Called in to fight yet again.

The following year, I was sitting in the back of an old cab, looking out through the rear window; looking at mother and our house becoming smaller the longer we drove. Mother had decided that I wasn’t safe there anymore, and moved me against my will to some relatives on the western coast.

I hated them the moment I met them. I wanted to go back home to mother, not spend any more time with them people. But I was stuck, and couldn’t return home, at least not until the war was over, so they told me. I never gained any friends, and spent most of my time either locked up in my room or wandering the shores on the edge of town.

The sounds of waves always made me feel calm, made me forget my anger for just a moment.

Three years after my move to this new place, I got a letter from my mom, and when I had read it, it felt as heavy as lead in my hands. Father wouldn’t come home. He was killed by a German officer in battle. I still remember how it felt when I tore the letter into pieces.

After that day, I stopped locking myself in my room and spend almost my every waking hour at the beach. I sometimes imagined the sea as the tears that had once fallen from all the gods as they mourned their own loss. And that was comforting, in a way. It felt like I wasn’t so alone, next to the ocean.

Six years after the day of father’s departure, we all received news from London; Hitler was dead. The war was over. But there was no celebration in our house, only mourning. My mother had just passed away, alone in my childhood house. I wasn’t there for her, and she died without anyone to love her. Every day I regretted that I wasn’t there for her in her final moment. Every day I hoped for a miracle, something that would change my past and my life.

I guess my prayers were answered, in a way. A rather strange answer, I’ll add, but an answer nonetheless.

I stayed with my relatives. Now that both my parents were gone, I had no desire to go back home again. Wrapped up in all my sorrow and anger, I had forgotten what home once meant to me. I had forgotten my own values in life and I didn’t care.

Often I thought of ending it all. I thought of just walking out into the ocean and drown myself. It felt fitting, almost serene; that thought of ending it all through water. To become one with the waves that soothed me so. I thought it to be almost poetic, at times.

On my nineteenth birthday, there wasn’t any joy or happiness. As the first rays of the rising sun hit, I was already down by the ocean, wishing, hoping, and dreaming. Wishing for anything to happen, something that could save me from myself.

My step-parents came down to the shore by noon, along with a few of their friends that I had never cared about. They brought food, said they might as well celebrate my birthday here, where I wanted to be. I ate their food, but I didn’t taste it. I was dead inside, and had already made my decision.  They laughed and had fun, and I partook, but I didn’t feel anything.

They left me alone some time later, and I fell asleep in the sand as night approached.

When I woke up, the sun was setting over the ocean, and I instantly knew that it was time. Time to step into the waves. I sat up slowly, my back aching from having been still for too long. My legs cracked just a little bit when I got up on my feet.

A sigh escaped my lips as I looked out over the ocean one last time. I then stumbled forward in the sand, feeling like a sleepwalker. The water seeped into my shoes and socks. It was freezing, but I felt nothing. After a few more steps, the water reached my knees. Once it came up to my hips, I couldn’t hold back an instinctive shiver. 

The surface was clear, and I could see my shoes sinking into the sand at the bottom. All I had to do was follow them, dip my head. One sharp inhale and it would all finally be over. I steeled myself, closed my eyes to get ready.

And then, I heard something.

I heard a voice. It caused me to open my eyes and turn around. There wasn’t anyone on the shore, I was all alone, yet I could’ve sworn I heard someone singing nearby. A clear voice, singing a single note. But I was alone, someone singing was impossible, I thought.

Without warning, I was thrown off balance and into the cold water. Due to my concentration of finding whoever it was that I had heard, I never noticed the stronger waves approaching, and once it hit me I was too surprised to struggle.

And for the first time since I entered the water, I felt something. When the water made its way down my throat and I felt how bitterly cold it was, my body resisted it with every fibre of its being. I think I screamed, but nothing could be heard beneath the surface.

I finally got my head above the water, instantly coughing and wheezing. Slowly, I crawled back to shore as wave after wave rolled over my back and chilled me to the bone. I dragged myself into the sand and rolled over on my back, and it felt as if my insides had turned into jelly.

Slowly but surely, my mind slipped away and I couldn’t hold my eyes open for long and I passed out. I remember hearing the voice yet again just moments before everything went black.

I’m not sure for how long I was out, but the skies above had turned black, illuminated only by the stars, looking down on me. Perhaps they pitied me. Maybe they saw nothing but the husk of a broken man, on his back on an empty beach.

It was at this point I realized that I actually wasn’t on my back entirely. In fact, I was sitting up just slightly, with my back rested against something hard and cold, probably rock. The stars I saw where in fact the reflection in the sea before me, not the ones above me.

At this point, I also realized that something felt odd from my waist down. For just a split second, I got worried that I was injured in some way, and tried to move. My legs brushed against something. Something warm and soft. Something living and breathing. I could distinctly make out its heartbeat, almost synched with my own.

Whatever it was, it lay across my legs and prevented me from moving, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, or a bad. I couldn’t see what it was because of the dark, and my eyes adjusted slowly to the dim shadows.

Instead, I tried to touch it gently. It was soft, warm to my touch. Soothing, even. What I felt was definitively the fur of some sort of animal, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what kind it was. I pulled back my hand and gasped quietly in surprise as my fingers brushed against something different, something that wasn’t fur.

For just a brief moment, I was sure I felt what could only have been feathers against my fingertips.

But that was impossible, there was no bird known to man this big, or any animal with wings. Something was seriously wrong, and I couldn’t stop my heart from racing. I started to struggle, wriggling my legs to get loose. Simple human instinct had kicked in. Fear of the unknown. I just wanted to get up and run from this whole situation.

That was when it happened. It woke up.

My whole body became cold in a matter of milliseconds; I became frozen in place as I saw a mouth open up before me, lines of shiny white teeth revealing themselves. I’m not going to lie; I thought it would bite into me or try to eat me. Attack me in some way. For a moment, I thought of grabbing it by the neck to hold it back.

But all it did was let out a quiet little sound. A long, drawn-out yawn. And just like always when someone else yawns, I suddenly felt the urge build in my throat as well. As much as I tried to hold it back, my body won over my mind and I too let out a long yawn, involuntarily closing my eyes as I did. When I opened them a few seconds later, I was met by a vision that I’ll never forget.

A pair of brilliant, cyan eyes. Big and bright, looking straight into mine. Neither of us blinked for a long while.

Despite the darkness of night surrounding us, those eyes shined like a couple of beacons in front of me, and the more I looked into them, the more I felt my body relax. The fear I’d felt washed away, replaced by an almost fuzzy feeling of warmth and comfort. The creature blinked, and then yawned again, and I could feel it stretch its legs over the side of my stomach, the way a cat would after a long sleep. I almost expected to feel the sting of claws against my side, but all I felt was something hard and cold.

And just like the way you would do to a cat, I slowly reached my hand up to the creature’s face, held it in front of it for a few seconds, trying to show it that I wouldn’t hurt it. I was expecting it to sniff on it or something, but it didn’t. It just tilted its head sideways and gave me a wondering look. Carefully, I moved my fingers to touch its chin. The fur was soft and warm against my fingertips.

The creature closed its eyes slightly, clearly enjoying the feel of my touch, and it leaned a little bit to the side, into the palm of my hand.

Now that my eyes had gotten used to the dim light, I saw the creature clearer, saw that besides the fur on its body, it also had something that looked like human hair on the top of its head. Hanging of the side of its head, wavy like the water itself, bearing a light pink hue, almost like the sky as the sun set in the west. I’d never seen anything quite like this being.

Whatever it was, it was beautiful.

“Hey, little one…”

I finally broke the silence that had been surrounding us for so long. I don’t know why I spoke to it, but I know that it listened and tried to understand me. And I think it did. As it looked at me with wondering eyes, a thought suddenly hit me. An odd thought, an impossible thought.

“Did you… where you the one singing earlier?”

The creature lit up like the sun when I asked it, its eyes beaming and its mouth drawn into a shy smile. I nodded slowly as I let this response sink in. As strange as it was, this creature understood the question and answered it positively. This meant that it was in fact this being that had been singing. Somehow, this tiny creature, who couldn’t even speak, had projected such perfect notes all by itself.

Then, another question entered my mind.

“How did I get here? I was…” I looked up to the black waves of the sea. “Out there.”

Again, the creature gave me a shy little smile in response.

“Did you…?”

It nodded at my question.

I didn’t know what to think. I had just almost drowned myself, only to be saved by a singing, yellow creature with the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. A singing creature with wings. At this point, I began to question my own sanity.

Perhaps I had gotten too much water in my lungs, and it had gotten to my brain. Maybe I was just hallucinating. But if I did, then why did it feel so real? If it was just an illusion, how could I feel its warmth?

How could I feel its breath against my arm as it pressed the side of its head against my chest? How could a figment of my imagination hug me to keep me warm?

The sensation of warmth and comfort almost sent me to sleep, despite the surrealism of the situation. I blinked a few times to wet my eyes again, and looked down on the body of the creature, now sleeping soundly, pressed against my chest.

I could see its wings much clearer now, downy yellow feathers that looked as smooth as silk. For just a moment, I wanted to touch them, but I didn’t, thinking it would wake the creature up, and I didn’t want to bother it now that it looked so peaceful. 

Looking over its body, I noticed something odd on the side of its leg, down by the knee. At first, I was confused and didn’t understand what I was looking at, much less why I was even seeing it. Why it was there in the first place was beyond me.

Three pink little butterflies.

Had they been drawn on the fur? And why would someone even to that? Did it grow naturally? My mind was racing to understand, but the three butterflies remained a mystery. To this day, I still don’t know what purpose they served.

After a few minutes of silence, a new sound filled my ears. To this day, I still have no idea what it was or where it came from, but I know all too well what it meant; since it was a sound I would hear many times over after this fateful night.

It began as a rumble, a distant roaring, slowly growing stronger, louder. The little creature on my lap suddenly snapped awake and turned its head towards the sea. The sound was coming from somewhere out there, and it started to become clearer.

First, there was the sound of water, like the sound of waves smashing against a rock. But it didn’t come from the sea itself, since the shoreline had become calm a long time ago, and not a wave breached the sand for as far as my eyes could see.

Then, more sounds joined the beating waves, and I must admit that they scared me quite a bit. There was a sound of singing wind, like wings beating hard in the skies. The sound of hooves bearing down on stone, loud and alarming.

Just like the sound of the waves, it all came not from the sea itself, but somewhere else. I followed the gaze of the yellow creature, only to find that the sounds came from up above, from somewhere deep beyond the clouds in the sky. I almost expected a legion or horses and their riders to emerge from up above, but none came, only the sound which steadily grew louder as time passed.

The creature turned back to look at me, its eyes glowing with something that looked like sadness. I had no idea what to believe, I was just someone who had been pulled into something far beyond my own imagination, and I will never understand it.

Without a sound, the creature stood up from me and turned to the sea. I remained on the ground, not knowing what to do or what was about to happen. Just when I thought of getting up, I was surprised and thrown back as the creature suddenly jumped me and wrapped its front legs around my shoulder. At the time I didn’t understand, but later on I realised that it hugged me. Just like a human being.

It let go of me and started for the shoreline. I stood up and hurried after it, a newly awakened feeling beating inside of me. I tripped across the sand as I witnessed the creature in front of me unfurl its wings and lift from the ground.

“Wait!” I shouted, still stumbling my way towards it. “Don’t go, come back!”

I reached the place where it had been standing just a few seconds prior and looked up to it as it soared away above my head. I called out to it over and over, asked it to come back, but it didn’t listen. Slowly but surely, it disappeared into the clouds on the horizon, taking the strange sounds with it.

Silence yet again. I was left alone on the beach, none the wiser of what had just transpired.

For the rest of the night I waited, sitting in the sand and looking longingly out towards the distance. I had to know what the creature was; I just had to, no matter what. I wondered if I had been witness to one of the many unknown species of animals that populated the globe, but I quickly dismissed that thought. This being was something altogether different.

The long night at the beach gave me a cold, and I spent the next day in bed, coughing and sneezing until my throat burned and my nose bled. My step-parents would check on me from time to time, but for the most part of the day, they left me alone with my sickness and my thoughts.

It was impossible to push away the thoughts of that yellow fur, those downy wings and those big eyes. They haunted my mind like some forlorn ghost and refused to leave me alone. It had saved my life, and I had to know what it was and where it came from.

A few days later my cold hadn’t gone away, instead only getting worse, but they said it was no longer at risk of infecting others, so I begun to move about the house again. Often I would find myself in the hallway on the second floor, looking out through the window and out across the sea. That creature was out there somewhere.

Despite the protests of my step-parents, I went outside one evening and made my way back down to the shore. It was quiet as can be, and the sea was calm and peaceful. In silence, I sat down on a rock, wiped my nose with the sleeve of my tweed jacket, and waited. All night I waited, but the creature never came back, and my cold just got worse for it.

For several weeks, my mind was constantly filled with memories of that night, countless questions and not a single answer. I would spend the day trying to understand and only be rewarded with terrible headaches and migraines. I spent night after night going through the family’s modest library, then the one further in town, but I found nothing on the animal, nothing that brought me closer to any form of answer.

What was it? Where did it come from, how did it end up here, why did it save me? How did it save me? Why did it have wings, and what did those butterflies mean? These questions haunted my every waking moment like a mildly annoying dog constantly nipping at your heels.

The only thing that I was at least somewhat sure of was that the creature had in fact been a She, a female. Of course, there was no way for me to be certain about it, but it did have the feeling around it, some sort of femininity, however disjointed it may sound. I think it was the eyes.

Winter came as it always did, and the cold winds managed to wipe out my thoughts and push them into the back of my head. I didn’t forget about her, but I moved on. The winter was one of the coldest I’ve seen, but thankfully, it was also the shortest. An intense spurt of horrible weather, too strong to be kept up for too long.

Spring and summer came and went, uneventful and uninteresting. I had almost forgotten that night completely, but I often found myself staring intently whenever I came across a butterfly. 

In the later months of summer, I got myself a job at the sawmill on the outskirts of town, and for a while it was all that filled my mind. For the first time in my short life, I learned the value of hard labour and the satisfaction that came after a hard day’s work. It became my entire life, and to say that I became a workaholic is an understatement.

I began to grow more muscle from my work, and with that came a little more self-esteem and pride. I was young, looked amazing and felt great, better than I had ever felt through my entire life. It was a good way of life, almost too good to be true.

As time went on, I forgot not only the animal, but also the beach I used to love so much. Everything faded away as my obsession with work occupied my mind, and by the age of twenty five, I had become a completely different man than the scared little boy I once was.

But then it all had to end, naturally. That seems to be some sort of common theme with happiness and joy; it always has to end, usually as abruptly as possible.

Like any other day, I toiled away at the sawmill, my mind focused on nothing but work. I never saw one of the new workers close by as he tripped and dropped his equipment, I was too busy focusing on the simple act of chopping up wood. It wasn’t my usual spot on the workplace, but every now and then I took the axe for a few swings.

My head shot to the side when the log hit the side of my skull. The axe left my hands and went flying into the air, only to plummet down on me the next second. It happened so fast, and before I had even managed to understand what had happened, the axe had lodged itself into one of my thighs.

After this, I don’t remember much. I guess I went into a state of shock and couldn’t register everything. I remember a lot of shouting and yelling; remember being carried and the terrible pain in my leg.

I remember waking up in a small room, which turned out to be the hospital in the next town over. they said I was lucky that the axe hit my thigh and not further up, but that I would never be able to walk properly again. My whole life had been shattered by the sharp edge of the head of an axe.

Fortunately, when one door closes, another opens, and behind this door I found Sharon, a girl my age which I met at the hospital. She was a nurse, actually, assigned to help me with my broken leg. Long story short, when I finally was released from the hospital, she came with me.

We lasted for two years before it went down the drain. Once the initial love has settled, we both slowly came to the realization that we were too different from one another, and decided to go our separate ways. We still remained friends until the day she passed away, but I don’t want to go into that. It had been a good run, but we parted ways without any hard feelings, both sure that it was the right thing to do.

And so, at the eve of my twenty eight birthday, after everything I had been through the past years, I somehow found myself back at the beach yet again. It hadn’t changed a bit since the last time I saw it, and I cursed myself for forgetting just how much I had once loved it.

The sun was setting over the horizon, and I stood in silence by the water’s edge, watching it go down. I remembered my attempt in the waters, and it felt like it had never even happened, at least not to me but to someone else, like something you’d read in a book. I realized then that despite everything, I never wanted to try something like that ever again.

As I turned away from the now dark horizon to make my way back home, something caught my attention. I slowly turned back to the ocean and looked across the waters, my mouth now hanging agape and my face slowly taking on a pale hue.

I heard hooves in the skies. Then wings. My lips begun to twist into a smile.

The clouds parted before me, giving way to a ray of light as bright as the sun itself, and from that light, I saw something emerge. Something small and tiny, it’s little wings beating against the wind and its yellow fur glistening like gold in the bright light.

Despite my leg still not being properly functional, I took off running towards the light. I came closer, and finally saw those radiant, cyan eyes looking down on me, and I let out a short laugh of joy as the creature soared down to meet me.

She hovered above the sand just a few feet away, looking at me. The moment before I pounced her and hugged the strange creature, I thought I could see a little bit of worry in her eyes. But I didn’t care, I was simply too happy about seeing this being again.

It took me a while to realize that I was crying, and as I pulled away from the embrace, I did my best to wipe my eyes clean.

“I never thought I’d see you again.”

The creature gave me one of those shy smiles I hadn’t seen for so many years, and landed carefully in the sand. Now that I was more aware of the situation, I took a few seconds to scan the creature properly, and to my amazement, I found that it was looking a lot like a horse or pony, just a lot smaller and with a few different features, like a face that looked more human than equine. And the fact that she had wings.

She made me think of that winged horse that Hercules rode in Greek mythology, a Pegasus. That was the closest thing to any animal I could put it, even if said animal was a mythological being.

I was pulled out of my thoughts as the little creature started suddenly started singing, and for the first time I saw it with my own eyes, not about to drown myself in the ocean. It was clear and beautiful, and I couldn’t help myself from sinking down in the sand, awestruck by the visage of this creature, this tiny Pegasus, singing her clear tones just for me.

Breath-taking, that’s the best way to put it. Her song was like a drug to the mind and soul, and I just wanted more.

Still singing, she suddenly grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up on me feet. How she managed to do this with her hooves is beyond me, but somehow she did, and there I stood. She grabbed me by my hands and made me hold them up, and with a little twist of her legs, she signalled me to hold on to her. I did, but was still unprepared when she took me away. She backed up and pulled me with her, and I stumbled after with my injured leg which for some reason felt completely healthy all of a sudden.

She sang and sang, spiralled round in the sand and pulled me along for the ride, never breaking eye contact with me. Slowly, my mind came to a realization; we were dancing. Me, a full-grown human man almost in his thirties, dancing with an equine creature with wings, on a moon-lit night at this ancient beach.

Once I understood, I managed to pull myself together and join the dance more properly. All aching in my leg was blown away, and I performed steps and moves I never thought I’d be able to do, albeit clumsy.

I was loving it, this new feeling of unhindered joy, and I never wanted it to end. The dance carried on for what felt like hours, still accompanied by her clear singing as the moon made its way across the sky above us.

And then I heard that sound again. The sound I dreaded and hope would never come back. Hooves and wings, somewhere in the clouds. Instantly, she stopped singing and looked over my shoulder, out over the ocean. Her face slowly turned to a frown.

“Do you really have to go?” I said meekly as the pain in my leg slowly returned. “Can’t you stay a little while longer?”

She looked at me with sad eyes and shook her head, and I felt my own face melt into sorrow. The sound became louder, and without a warning, she suddenly took off over my head. In turned around and saw her a few meters away.

“Will I ever see you again?”

At my question, she stopped in the air before turning her head towards me. She looked at me, and I could see something in her face change, but it was too far away and too dark to make it out completely. After alternating between looking at me and the clouds on the horizon, the creature made a quick dash through the air back down towards me.

Before I could say or do anything, the tiny being embraced me again, just like the last time we saw each other. I answered her and held her close, the heat of her body keeping me warm on that cold August night.

Slowly, she pulled away from me and looked into my eyes. I felt a frown over my lips, but for some reason, she was smiling. She moved her face towards mine and placed a little peck on my right cheek before quickly taking off into the skies without another look at me. She flew fast, and I called for her, trying my best to keep up with her on my now almost numb leg.

She didn’t listen, and in the blink of an eye, she was gone.

For a long while I stood and watched the horizon, even though I knew she wouldn’t be back. I touched my fingertips to my cheek, but felt no remains of what she had just did. A yellow, equine-like creature had just danced with me, and then kissed me on the cheek. Just like last time, I was left with a lot of questions and no answers.

That kiss haunted me for a long while.

Slowly, life returned to normal after the recent events. My step-parents passed away, and they left their house in my care. I couldn’t do anymore work due to my leg, and so I was forced into early retirement, and was gifted with the rest of the family’s life savings. It wasn’t much, but I thought it would be enough to keep me going at least. From time to time, Sharon would stop by and we’d spend the day as good friends, but that was is. Despite our history, it was still nice to have someone to turn to, someone I knew I could trust.

A year later, on the day of my birth, I once again visited the beach. And as sure as clockwork, she came to me from the clouds yet again, and we spent the night entangled in another dance across the sands. The rest of my year was spent craving these moments, craving to meet my dear friend yet again.

I was devastated when Sharon passed, and I refused to even leave my house for weeks. Not that I would be able to get far anyway, by that time I had taken to using a cane to be able to walk properly due to the leg.

Each and every birthday I would spend on the beach in the company of my Pegasus, each and every time we danced to her singing, and all my pain seemed to subside the moment she took hold of me. I didn’t need the cane when she held me, and every time we danced, my body felt as young as the day we met so many years ago.

She really warmed the heart of a bitter old man, even if it was for only a day.

I’m old. I’ve lived a long, long life. I’ve seen my fair share of pain, happiness, sorrow and joy. I’ve known love and hate, anger and spite. When I say that my life has been nothing but fulfilling, I’m being completely honest. Despite all of my hardships, I’d never trade this life for anything.

It all came together thanks to a tiny Pegasus that brought joy to my life. It’s been so long since I’ve seen her.

On the eve of my seventy eight birthday, I slowly dragged myself from my home and down to the seas, just as I did every year, yearning to be back with her. My leg burned from the walk, and my back had started to become a little bit crooked, but the thought of meeting her again made me overlook such trivialities.

The walk across the beach became harder and harder with each passing year, and I found myself having to rest more and more often as I made my way towards the water. I drew in a rustling breath and started to cough as the sun set on the horizon. I pulled up a small handkerchief from the pocket of my jacket and coughed into it instead.

I cleared my throat one final time before looking back out to the ocean. She would be there in just a little while, and all my pain would go away. How I longed to see her again, to hold her, to hear her amazing voice and to gaze into those eyes of hers. How I longed.

She never came.

Not the next year either.

It was proving almost impossible to even reach the shore by this time, but I refused to give up, refused to miss that chance of meeting her one last time.

That was five years ago, and I haven’t seen her yet. At first, I worried that something has happened to her, but then my old brain started to connect the dots. I wasn’t the only one that grew older. I had noticed that her fur had slowly been losing its colour as the years passed on, and the last time I saw her, she had big bags under her eyes and her voice had been just a little bit strained.

Five years ago, I saw her for the last time. Five years ago, she took this withered old man for a final dance. Five years ago, she warmed a cold heart. But now it seems that age has finally caught up to us both, and wherever she may be now, I hope she’s in a better place, where her song will ring true for all eternity. I loved that strange little animal, I truly did. Every second of every day until the end. Never did I find a friend such as her, and I miss her dearly.

Where ever she may be, I thank her with all of my heart for bringing that slither of joy into my life, for making me endure. She offered me no less than the most true friendship one could ever find, and for that, I thank her.

I will visit the beach one last time; I will look into the ocean again and wish for her company.

The water has always soothed me. The sounds of waves always makes me feel calm, makes me forget my sadness for just a moment. The sea is the tears that once fell from all the gods as they mourned their own loss. And that is comforting, in a way. I feel like I’m not alone, next to the ocean.

I will step into the cold waters again, here at the end of my long life. I will walk into the horizon.

And this time, this one final time, I know I will see her again. I will be with her.

Where ever she may be.



1927 - 2010