A Friend for a Season

Time moves differently for us dragons. We measure it in heartbeats lost, in friendships that fade like starlight at dawn, in young eyes that once saw us clearly but now look through us as if we were morning mist.

A dragon is a stranger in search of a friend, and I’ve been searching for centuries.

Our nature is to be visible to those who carry grief so deep it changes how they see the world. I’ve appeared throughout the millennia to countless children: war orphans, lost siblings, and those who’ve said goodbye too soon or not at all. Each time, I hope. Each time, I stay. Each time, I watch as their eyes slowly lose the ability to find me as their hearts soften into memory.

Thalia was different.

I found her at the playground on the corner of Main and Leominster, sitting alone and still on a swing. She was seven, small for her age, with one untied sneaker and a red ribbon in her hair made from a piece of her mother’s favorite scarf — the one they buried her in three months ago.

When she first saw me, she didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She just tilted her head and said, “Are you lonely too?”

Other children saw what they needed to see: a guardian, a protector, an imaginary friend. But Thalia saw deeper to something no child had noticed before; she saw the weight of centuries spent saying goodbye. She saw not just my ability to help, but my need to be helped. My loneliness called to hers like an echo finding its source.

That’s when I knew she would break my heart differently than the others. She had the rare grace of a child who saw past my exterior to find my hurt inside.

We spent our mornings together before school with her riding on my back while she told me about her dreams. In the afternoons, I helped her with her homework (I’ve had centuries to learn my multiplication tables). At night, I curled around her as she slept so my scales would catch the moonlight from the window and cast constellations across the walls. As a dragon, I instinctively knew all the stars and their patterns, and I wove their stories into her dreams to keep the nightmares at bay. I told of heroes who also learned to carry their grief into the light, of paper boats surviving storms, of small seeds breaking through concrete. Each a reminder that even broken things can find their way toward the cleansing light of morning.

“Why can’t Daddy see you?” she asked me one day as we shared her peanut butter and fluff sandwich.

“Some things you can only see through tears,” I said, carefully picking up my half with claws that could crush mountains but had learned to handle children’s offerings with reverence.

Then one day late it happened: she hesitated before seeing me. She stood still as her eyes took a few moments to focus on me. A week after that, she laughed at her father’s joke. This time it was a genuine laugh, not the polite sound she’d been making since the funeral. I felt myself dissolving as her world slowly regained its colors. That’s the cruel irony of loving broken children. The more you help them heal, the sooner they forget how to see you.

Then one crisp morning, as maple seeds helicoptered around us like nature’s ballerinas, Thalia was telling me about her new friend Kelly from school. Her eyes drifted through me twice while she spoke. It was then I knew it was time.

“Thalia,” I said, my voice practiced and steady with centuries of similar goodbyes, “you’re getting stronger.”

She stopped, turned, losing me for a moment, and refocused. “I don’t want to be stronger if it means losing you, too.”

“The truth about sadness,” I said, “is that eventually it makes room for joy. Your mother and I share the same truth: love doesn’t end just because we can no longer hold it in our hands. It becomes part of who you are, like starlight becoming morning. Your mother’s love gave you the strength to heal. My purpose was to help you remember how, just like those who came before you and those who will come after, learn to carry their love in new and special ways. And now,” I whispered as her hand found the fading scales of my muzzle, “it’s my turn to be just as brave.“

The next morning, she came to the playground for the last time. I watched from the swings as she looked around, her eyes sweeping past me once, twice, three times. Then a single tear traced down her cheek like a falling star. She smiled, a bright, healing smile, and whispered to the playground: “Thank you.”

I stayed until she left. Soon, my dragon’s heart will form another scar to add to its collection. So, once again, I spread my wings and rose into the clear air to continue my eternal search, because that’s what dragons do. We are strangers searching for friends, knowing each friendship is a season, each goodbye a gift, each broken heart proof that we loved well enough to be forgotten.

Time moves differently for us dragons. We measure it in lessons learned, in hearts healed, in the privilege of being needed until we’re not. And sometimes in the laughter of children who no longer see us, but carry the memory of our love in their healing hearts.

After all, a dragon is just one more stranger in search of a friend. And tomorrow, somewhere, another child waits, weighted down by grief, ready to see me through their tears.

Until they don’t need to anymore.