Lethe

When I was a child, my father spoke of Lethe, his friend, who was a night-dark dragon. She lived beyond the curve of the moon, and sometimes, when the winds were just right, and the clouds not too thick overhead, she would visit, and bear him up into the air on her back. He told me of the adventures they shared, and all the wonders they had seen. A beach where it was always evening, awash with the silvery light of the cosmos, where every grain of sand was the seed of a tiny, perfect pearl. A lush meadow where faeries gathered for meetings on toadstools, and held out their tiny, twiggy limbs to catch the falling drops of rain. Forests that were forever caught in the fires of autumn, where gnomes bedded down in mounds of leaves that crinkled, scarlet and gold.

I asked if I could go with them.

“Not just yet, love, not just yet.”

When I became a teenager, my father became an old man, and the minutes between us became precious and few. We seldom spoke of gnomes, and faeries, and dragons, when I turned my thoughts to boys and girls. He still spoke of Lethe, and sometimes I would even listen, but my smiles were then half-hearted, and my nods were always impatient. I did not try to encourage his talks of fancy and dreams of magic, but he pressed all the same. He wanted to entice me to remember old lands, while I was putting all my focus into discovering myself. I had my eyes on the future while he only wanted to talk about the past. I was racing ahead while he doddered along, trapped in the fog of “back then,” and “long before.”

I asked if he would just let it go.

“Not just yet, love, not just yet.”

By the time I had become an adult, my father, who was never young, had become wizened, weak and gray. He no longer spoke of faeries, or gnomes, or Lethe, and I had all but forgotten they existed, until I saw them together. Lethe was as he had always described her, night-dark even under the pale, silvery light of the crescent moon. Her eyes were blue and boundless and burned with the scattered light of a thousand dying stars. She crouched there amongst the hedges of our backyard, while faeries and gnomes darted, wild and careless, between her legs, and in her talons she held my father. He no longer sat astride her back, tall and strong, but clung to her neck like a babe in arms, frail and frightened. He turned his face away, weeping softly into her velvet scales, for he did not know me. I looked up at Lethe, that beautiful night-dark dragon, with eyes like stars and wings as wide as forever, whose very name meant “forgetfulness”, and I knew why she had come.

I asked if they must go right now.

“Not just yet, love, not just yet.”