It began as most brilliant ideas do: With beer.

Sitting around shooting the shit (with a registered weapon, naturally – this IS Canada, after all) on New Year’s Eve, we got to talking about my greatest love. My church, my home, my sanctuary – my nightmare. It too was a brilliant idea born of beer.

My whole life it had been my lover, parent, child, twin and temple. Then it

As it once was, my temple

was gone. Just ruins, which I excavated with care and store in a sarcophagus. Its demise haunts my darkest dreams. In life it was my safest place – in death my greatest demon. It was the one thing I hadn’t overcome, in a lifetime of overcoming the kind of fear and darkness a greater man would be proud to have done.

As we chatted over the foamy ale, my adventurous friend said, “Fine. We’ll go in the morning.”

Pfft. In his cups (not everyone can handle their liquor as well as the hard-drinking RightGirl), I merely smiled and nodded. Yeah, whatever. I hadn’t set foot back on holy ground since July 2004. I wasn’t about to do it the first day of the new year, with beer farts and a headache.

Alas, the crazy motherfucker was not kidding. The next morning, the first day of 2012, we hit the road to face a dragon. A really big, really depressing dragon.

As an aside, my friend has the world’s smallest bladder, so a trip that should have taken six hours took nine. Jesus.

Anyway, we were off, with me at the helm of the Dragon Slayer, as I’ve come to call his vehicle. I tend to be a bit more insistent with the gas pedal than he, and have way more snow miles under my belt (not a euphemism).

As we got closer to our destination – a place I have not taken many mortals in the past – I began to grow nervous. My breath became shallow and my pupils expanded and contracted rapidly, making the bright headlights on the dark backroads quite perilous. Only focusing on a brutal whiteout at a particularly rough patch of road kept me from having a full on panic attack. My friend suggests I caused the inclement weather, and under the circumstances, I really don’t disagree.

Finally we rounded the bend to where the greatest love of my life once stood, a living thing, breathing, until the fire consumed it. But the road was slippery, and I wouldn’t stop the car until we could safely park. I barely glanced out the side window at the new monument that now stood. My goal was the driveway of the house at the top of the hill.

“Someone is waiting for you,” he said, and as I aimed for the driveway, I saw that Mr G (my father’s best friend and my best friend’s father, all conveniently rolled into one) was out with his dog. The snow stopped as I glided the Dragon Slayer into the driveway.

I hopped out into the cool night, and Mr G’s face looked as if he’d seen a ghost. I suppose he had. After all, this was a ghost-hunting mission, was it not? And if my father’s ghost walks at all, it walks in my body, and in my face.

“You said you’d never come back,” Mr G breathed as I approached him.

“Well then, it’s a fucking Christmas miracle, isn’t it?”

We embraced, and he ushered us into his home, staying outside with his gigantic hound. The smell hit me, and I began to fall apart. That smell. The wood and carpet, the doggy scent and the G-family smell… These were the last people left alive who knew what it looked like when my smile reached my eyes. And they hadn’t seen it reach since I was seven years old. Once Daddy sold the house, my eyes died. Here were the only living witnesses that I had once been a happy child. This house – their house – had seen me happy, too.

I greeted and embraced the ageless Mrs G, who had not changed in the half decade plus since I had seen her at her mother-in-law’s funeral. Mr G and the uber-beast returned, and we all made pleasant small talk until my companion reminded me that, “We came here to do something, so put your coat on and let’s get it done.”

Several deep breaths and some panicked tears later, my coat and boots were back on and we headed out into the pristine snow. The hill was steep, and my companion lent me his arm as I navigated in my heeled city boots. Even at the height of great anxiety and crisis, I was stylish. Heh. After all, one can’t slay a dragon in any old thing. Remember Thatcher’s Birkin bags? My point exactly.

I had stopped pretending that I had any control over my emotions. I wept openly as we reached the bottom of the hill and I looked upon the new house. Inside was a happy family, backlit by a Christmas tree and a fireplace. They were innocent. It wasn’t their carelessness that led to the demise of the only thing I ever truly believed in; they had bought the property after the house was gone. Innocent.

The new house was bigger, necessitating carving out a section of the jutting bit of mountain in front in order to accommodate it. But my god – my one true god – it was breathtaking. It was good. It was, as I described it, “the most beautiful tombstone I have ever seen.”

And with that, a dragon was slain. I knew from the G’s that the family had a little girl who – when they bought the property – was about the age I had been when Daddy broke my heart. And here she was, the replacement child, coming of age in a way that I hadn’t been able to, surrounded by walls of love her parents built for her.

She had my blessing. The beautiful monument had my blessing.

We spent the night in the city. Though hospitality was offered in the woods, I wasn’t ready for that – yet. That day will come, no doubt, but after slaying a dragon, I needed a little distance.

I will return. I will go back to the people who remember my smiling eyes, to the house whose smell I grew up in, and to the woods that still hold all my secrets and sooth.

I killed a dragon. If I do nothing else this year, this decade, this lifetime, at least I killed a dragon.

This never happens in opera