I'm just getting over a cold. I feel a lot better, but my voice has almost stopped working entirely. It's eerie to say something and have no noise come out. Or to try to make an announcement at work and have your voice cracking all over the place.
I did have work today, so all that talking certainly didn't help.
I'm in the middle of My Neighbor Totoro.
It's not the first time I've thought this, but it's the first time I thought about writing it down. You see it in movies sometimes - including some movies that I dearly love like Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service.
In Totoro, people can only see Totoro and the cat bus and everything when they're children. None of the adults see the cat bus dashing past.
And in Kiki's Delivery Service, Kiki can no longer speak to Jiji once she grows up (although they changed this in the English version of the movie).
(Also in Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, only children can see the Picori)
Only children have access to these magical things. When they grow up, they outgrow them.
That always seemed unfair to me. Sure, plenty of adults abandon their child-like innocence and that love of adventure and fantasy. But not everyone. Why can't adults see cool creatures or talk to cats?
In one book I read, all children are born knowing how to talk to animals. But as they grow up, all the adults say that it's impossible to talk to animals. They insist that the kids are making it up. Eventually children start to believe it and they lose that ability. Very few people retain it as an adult.
I like to believe that's what's going on here XD.
I addressed something similar in Evva's story.
In some old mythology, unicorns were said to only come to virgins. That seemed unfair in the same way (though people back then had some pretty messed up views on the value of women). I took it as a metaphorical thing, that unicorns come to the pure of heart, or the innocent.
So in my world, unicorns only come to the innocent, aka the pure of heart.
Innocence doesn't necessarily mean that you have no idea what evil is. An even stronger form of innocence is knowing evil, but not letting it in. So it's easier for children to be innocent, but it's quite possible for adults too.
The unicorn in my story, Frostfall, is happy to hang out with the married couple, as well as the young girl.
It was after I wrote this that I read a short story by Peter S. Beagle: author of The Last Unicorn. In that story, the woman thought she would never be able to see a unicorn again because she was no longer a virgin. But the unicorn came back to her anyway, and the myth proved to be true. And I went, "Yesss, thank you."
I like his wording for it. In The Last Unicorn, he says that unicorns are "visible only to those who seek and trust."
It doesn't matter what age you are. You can always seek and trust, if you let yourself.
Heck, I'd be just as happy to go on a magical journey now as I was when I was in elementary school.
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