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When you were younger, Link would tell you all about fairies.
He told you he believed that fairies were real.
Fairies aren’t a myth, he’d tell anyone who would listen. They’re real as the moon in the heavens or the birds in the skies or the fish in the rivers and oceans. He’d say it with a sort of eccentric twinkle in his eye, the kind one’s grandfather might have whilst regaling family dinners with old tales, and the adults will sigh and groan, and the children will giggle because they are young and still believe in magic, in the whimsical, can still indulge in uncomplicated wonder.
If one is to understand him, they’d need to start with this.
As it happens, it started with his grandfather. Grandfather, he called the old man who raised him. Grandfather Deku, he would say with a nostalgic crinkle in his eyes, who would regale little Link with all the strangest and most wondrous tales in the world.
The old man wasn’t Link’s grandfather by blood. Link never knew his actual grandfathers: he knew little about his actual parents, for that matter. He was a foster child. His mother had been far too young to raise him, so when he’d been too young to remember, he’d been dropped into the beak of the metaphorical crane and flown off to ease an old heart’s loneliness.
“He’d call me his little fairy boy,” Link told you. “Said I dropped down into his life like a blessing. Best thing that ever happened to him.”
He died in Link’s final year of high school, Link said. He left behind a house, some money for Link’s college fund, and a dream of chasing fairies.
If they’re real, he told Link on his deathbed, find them for me, will you?
So Link had promised.
—
Once upon a time, you told him back: once upon a time, you were but a young girl. And that little girl did not believe in fairies.
You were one of those haughty-minded snobs in clean-pressed uniforms who would turn up their noses at fantasy books and science fiction movies. Part of this attitude was owed to your own innate bullheadedness, and part of it to your father, who had impressed upon you from a young age that the fantastical had no place in that practical world you lived in.
Your father was a perfect embodiment of the anti-Bohemian. Your father did not like magical things. He did not like symbols, allegory, metaphor. He did not believe in dragons, mythical or metaphysical.
Here be dragons, so the saying goes. If we ignore the dragons, then there are no dragons. And there is no need to be afraid of non-existent dragons.
—
You and Link were studying together at Ordon University, New Jersey. He was in his third year, you were in your fourth. He was majoring in biology, you in international relations. He was on the fencing team, you on badminton. As it happens, he would go on to get his bachelor’s, then his doctorate, then publish a paper about how liquid water might not be needed as a prerequisite for life. How about a gaseous solvent? he’d propose. As it happened, he would get laughed out of academia for that affront. That, and for calling Professor Revali—his doctoral supervisor-turned bitter rival—a “waste of oxygen” at a conference in Spain.
Not that either of you knew, back in those college days.
Link. Short for Lincoln, Lincoln Finn: but Lincoln was a handful, and made him feel old by too many centuries, so for as long as he could remember he’d instead gone by Link. He was bright like a waxy summer day. He’d lived in Boston for most of his childhood, and by his own reckoning he’d been a quiet but warm child, like a modest candle. He was young like bygone innocence, like long-shed boyhood, except the boyhood had never really left him. Still clung to his skin, glittered in his eyes, hung on his every word.
As for you, you were cold like the setting autumn, frosty to the touch. Once, you were not Zelda, but the rather loquacious Griselda. The name had been chosen for you by your father, who was rather fond of old-fashioned names, who only came to accept your chosen shortening of your name when he stumbled across some archival news piece on the eventful life and times of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ill-fated wife, Zelda Sayre, and decided that Zelda was fashionably old-fashioned as well.
You were born in the village of Hyrule, East Germany, at the tail end of winter in ’86. You were three when the wall fell in Berlin, five when Freddie Mercury passed. You were six when your mother passed, too. She’d been afflicted with respiratory problems since her youth, and a bout too many of winter pneumonia did her in. It was at her funeral that others began to whisper that you were not normal.
Look, whispered your many maternal aunts, your distant cousins, your father’s silver-tongued friends and their silver-tongued children: look, how she does not even cry at her own mother’s funeral. How she feels nothing.
They were right. You felt nothing. That is, you don’t remember feeling anything. It was January, and you were cold, and there was snow creeping into your dress shoes, damp in the darning of your socks, and you fidgeted about as they lowered the coffin and thought to yourself that you wanted to go home.
Here, the voice of your father would repeat in your head for many years to come. Look no further than that day. The real world is not a fairy tale. The real world is not an easy place. There is no simple happiness, simple love, simple beginnings or endings. You make do with what you have, and you content yourself with that.
—
By all measures, you shouldn’t have fallen in love with him.
You were meant to be busy, busy, constantly busy. You were perfect, perfectly responsible, perfectly studious. You did not have the time to think about others. You should not have had the time to think about attachment, about dalliances. About distractions. About love. You were meant to be above such petty foibles.
He was content with mundanity. He was content with being one ordinary boy out of many ordinary boys. Perhaps it was this carefreeness, this contentment with being ordinary and unremarkable, which lended him his warmth that you were so drawn to. And perhaps in another life, so it would have ended. His ordinariness drawn to its natural conclusion: making him one of many blurred names and blurred faces, your recollections of him meant to be filed and catalogued neatly into rows of drawers, shelves of drawers, in the back of your mind.
You and him were as close to opposites as any two human beings could be. He was flighty, you were cynical. He would dream of the sky, you would chain yourself by choice to the earth. He believed in the possibilities of destiny, you in its cruel traps.
You would always fret over tomorrow, while he would only ever think of today.
He didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in destiny. As for you, you were raised to believe in God, but you taught yourself to not believe in anything but your own two hands. You told Link as much. You told him your father was a man of the church. You told him that you used to grow your hair long and simply braided because such was the way of pious young girls, daughters of pious fathers.
But it’s short now, he remarked, a hand passing through the flaxen curtain at your shoulders.
Because the braiding took too long, you told him, and my father is a continent and an ocean away. So you’d cut it.
As it already happens, you would break up with him by the time you graduated and returned to Europe, to start your Masters in Switzerland. There would be no hard feelings between you and him. Life had simply led you down different paths. You would still keep in touch, but only tenuously.
In another world, that would have been the end of it.
—
Perhaps, if you didn’t love him, this story would be a simpler story. A kinder story.
As far as fairy tales go, this story would be a typical one.
There’s a princess, and a knight, and a dragon, in a vast and wondrous kingdom. The dragon comes to fell the princess’ kingdom. So the princess orders her sworn knight to protect her kingdom, and the knight sets out on a great quest, and slays the dragon, and the kingdom lives happily ever thereafter.
You could still say that this story is a fairy tale. Yet another reinvention of that old story, that well-worn story. In other versions, the knight is a fairy boy, a farm boy, the son of a knight himself. The princess is a pirate, an assassin, the rebirth of a goddess. You’ve run into many versions of this story. You’re certain there are many more versions of that story you do not know about.
It’s certainly one way to look at this whole mess of a tale. A digestible way.
It is also, in all the measures that matter, an untruthful way.