There’s a little world inside me, an alternate reality, where I’m still twelve and the alfalfa still smells of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Sis is there behind me, head in her feeder, as I sit on the stall’s ledge. I did it for so long thinking about it now I only now realize its incredibly weird for me not to be at the barn. I have a life in Alpine barn, stall six, that still lives on. It’s my ultimate sanctuary, my safe space. There was no world outside that stall, that U-shaped courtyard, Jonty and Jesse. That woman with the white horse and its melonoma’ed ass. That other odd woman with the equally odd bay arabian.
Maybe that’s the purest life ever felt. Riding our lease horses through the summer sprinklers. Remember life without a phone. Very synonymous to life at the ranch.
All those tack room critters. Those beatles, those mice, those bins in front with her grain. Beet pulp, rice bran, senior. First in that pool-shed-esque bin which she almost disassembled before I even made my way to the back of the car, IE driving, as always.
Lunging. I wonder how many revolutions I’ve done on the odd end of a rope.
When did I grow up?
I was twelve,
and then childhood was over.
I miss it.
Dearly.
Blink blink blink
How am I only just noticing?
Have I really been moving too fast to notice?
God I miss the days where I didn’t know anything but posting on the outside diagonal and cantering on the right lead.
It was the best feeling, popping off your helmet, the foam saturated with sweat and being COMPLETELY. COVERED. IN. DUST.
So much so that when the pool of sweat in your elbow crease dried it left a certain kind of tea leaf reading on your skin.
What happens to the worlds we no longer live in?
Do our alternate selves keep living on.
I hope so.
But not the ignorant ones.
The pure ones.
Of sweat,
And dirt,
And endless sun.
Of four walls and a mossy bucket and some shavings in my hair.
And a padlock, first SISY then 1997.
I hope she’s still running with Katie.
I hope she’ knows how special those summer days are
and never forgets the feeling of getting sprayed down in a wash rack.
If you can hear me, you will never know how perfect things are….and that’s perfectly ok.