Used to be I was a horse, silkened skin, made to run on mountainsides between the spires of evergreens and spindly aspens, knotted, knobbled eyes winking I went.
Used to be there was no rut that could make me skip or trip, or ever spill, though I bled, merrily as I went, lathered and restless. A being of the trees, of the cratered landscape, molded by root and rain that feeds the trees. And then of course, the leas, the seas of leas unending where my legs would span a thousand miles and yet never reach the ferned and mossy shoreline. Run, and run, and run again.
Used to be I was a horse.
Seems quite long ago that I’ve given it up for rooftops and laces. Bridles and troughs. Simpler than that even, I’ve given it up for walls, and screens and an unending itinerary. There is no losing one’s way, no matter how lost I might be. The strictures, the plans, the mandates, the muffled voices crackling over the wires that all seem to know what is meant for me. They all claim a waymarker, a leg, take me by the bit.
You’ve grown old and this is the way of things those muffled french horns intone from offscreen. And for the longest time, I nodded along as though I wrote the song.
But I used to be a horse and what it is to run along the water with all of yourself is what it is to live. There’s no metal in your mouth, no guiding hand at your cheek, no bag of sugar cubes or praise for your learned docility. You can pretend you forget what it is to live, but it’s just that, pretend.
Sometimes after many months of isolation and unplanned hermitage, I have woken up in a sweat, in a shock, and feel myself as quicksilver slipping out of my own grasp. If I am not a horse, nor a person, if I am not generating…then, what I am is just a cog, a function, a link in the chain keeping everything together. Useful. Valid. But not what I am.
Instead, if everything is a construct made to mean, made to keep me from getting dizzy looking over the edge to see the sort of existence that will not bow before me, but demands to be seized, what if I start looking, climbing, falling?…if what lies in the valley is that which drives light through stone, the power of thought I might have if I claimed it, why should I pretend it away? This is rhetorical power, but also real power to not be lost to the ideologies of those around me, not to just live in this rut and say there was no where else for me to go. To be free inside my own head. A power that kills gods and brings them back at will.
At a glance into such a canyon, all four of my knobby knees knock. I pull back up the covers. It feels like death, and is like death, and I know will not be safe there.
But sometimes, I settle down at my desk and start rubbing the eraser over those lines I’ve drawn for myself and I am back amongst the green trees, the open, treeless steppes. I drink from the cold water, and get air into the pockets of lung I dare not breathe freely with. I get enough of a hold to start remembering.
I am a horse and I will be again and again and again until I don’t remember anything else.
