I’ve loved stories since I was a little girl. I was so passionate about fairy tales ranging from The Gingerbread Man to Little Red Riding Hood. Once I was glued to my little amazon tablet, busy watching whatever fairy tale cartoon I had discovered on YouTube, there was nobody who could bring me back. That’s just where it started however. As I grew older, I evolved into reading books. The sort of books made for the growing minds of young kids. This was around the same time I started to comprehend the concept of a movie which helped me discover what very soon would become my single favorite thing ever.

I was about seven, maybe freshly turned eight at the time. My mom was dropping off my two other siblings at their dad’s house, so it was just my dad and me. We were sitting on the couch browsing through YouTube, eagerly trying to find something to watch, when my dad came across one of his old favorite movies on his recommend feed. The Last Unicorn.

He explained that he had first watched this movie when he was a young boy in Cuba when he could only watch whatever was being shown on his big box television, often American media dubbed in Spanish.  He insisted we watch it and I eagerly agreed. The movie was released in 1982 so understandably the quality was horrible, being a screen recorded movie posted on YouTube didn’t help.

As we sat this through the movie, I adored every second of it. It opened my eyes to a new variety of fantasy, one far greater than I had ever known. It was magical, but also had themes like losing one’s sense of self and maintaining the purity of one’s heart. To this day I still find it so melancholy and a necessary watch if you’re into fantasy.

Then two years ago, I discovered that the movie I loved so much was based off a book. I read it as soon as I could. Like most books that are turned into movies, it had details and plot points that weren’t mentioned in the movie. My once ultimate obsession became more obsessed over.

I know how the title sounds, The Last Unicorn. I’ve heard it all before. It sounds childish, something you’d expect as a bedtime story. But it’s so much more than that. The story follows a unicorn, elegant and graceful and so pure of heart. She lives in a lavender wood, where animals and critters thrive because no man was ever meant to find such land. In her loneliness, she thinks if there are more of her kind. She has never encountered another unicorn like her, she has only heard the tales of their great beauty.

She concludes that she’s likely the last, and leaves the safety of her protected forest to embark on an adventure to find others of her kind. Throughout the journey she grows. She is no longer pure, and no longer has that unwearied look in her eyes that she once had. She has seen the nature of humanity, and the framework of their morality. She has been mortal, and some part of her is mortal yet, she is full of tears and the fear of death. She is not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret.

This masterpiece of literature lives deep in my soul. It’s something so important to me because it taught me something so vital about being alive. It displayed an awareness of death and showed me to value life despite it. I hope that more young people like myself will learn to appreciate literature and its beauty, and works of art like The Last Unicorn.