Beyond the Unicorn

by Kimberly C. Jones©

How do you explain your idea of love
to those who treat it like a unicorn—
a creature they believe lives only in legends.
They wander far from themselves to find it,
offering their whole soul to shadows,
mistaking monsters for the myth
they were told would save them.


I used to be one of them.
I looked outside my own soul
for the things I craved to fill me—
to make me feel whole.
I chased reflections instead of roots,
handed my softness to hands
that did not know how to hold it,
believing the magic lived somewhere else
when it had been humming in my bones
the entire time.



And when I finally grew quiet enough
to hear the truth beneath my ribs,
I realized I had never been missing—
only misplaced inside my own forgetting.
Love was not a creature to be captured,
not a miracle waiting in someone else’s hands.
It was the steady pulse of my heart,
the space I had been carrying
from the very beginning…
the belonging I denied myself.


It waited with a patience
I did not yet understand.
It asked for nothing but my return,
for the moment I would finally stop running
from the self I had abandoned.
Love did not arrive —
I did.


So how do you explain your idea of love.
You don’t —
you show them it was never some mythical creature.
It is the quiet strength of knowing yourself,
the clarity that comes with seeing yourself,
and the courage to choose yourself
before anything else.