Urns for the ashes of tired hearts. Disappointed hopes.
Outside a choir of birds are singing down the sun, one shade of orange at a time until it blends into the dark horizon and disappears.
This train set to speeding against a background of melancholy
And music
Autumn in the air.
These Friday afternoons in Grand Central Station, standing in line for Metro North, waiting behind rows of tartan shorts for my overpriced ticket on a crowded and sweaty train.
Much is taking place in my world these days, and much of it has to do with Ham. These changes and transitions have called forth from the past deep seated memories and emotions, recollections that are coloring my thoughts and dreams. In them, I am transported back, seeing myself in flashes; three years old wearing blue jeans, red cowboy boots and a skirt, refusing to sacrifice frills for the saddle, insisting I could strattle both worlds. Ten and playing with Breyer horses on the thick green carpet, announcing to myself the “1999 wooooorld champion,” as I moved the model horse and rider through their victory pass. And then I am thirteen and looking down at the New England tricolor around Barry’s neck, how the red and blue silk catches the afternoon sun, how his sweat stains the fabric, how the celebratory ad in the Morgan Connection said, “I am so proud, -Judy,” and how my heart swelled when I saw it. And then seventeen, hoof black imbedded beneath my finger nails, baby oil everywhere, driven and serious and with Ham, Columbine, Curiosity behind me, feeling myself a horse woman at last. Like the afternoon Judy let me ride Wham-O and how for a moment at the end I felt him rise up beneath me, hovering suspended in that magic and timeless spot. And that instant at
And how there is so much more. A million moments in between these memory flashes, a million times the
All this is living inside me now, nestled in my heart and mind, painful but alive. And I wonder what to do with it, what it all means, and how it can possibly hurt so much. Because behind these memories, these thoughts and feelings, I am indeed thirteen again, and my mother is moving out of our family home, loading pieces of our life onto a moving van. And my father is crying, and yelling, he is locking himself in the back room for hours. And I am alone with the anger, the sadness, the lies and the past, the things I thought forgotten that have now coagulated in my chest, having been covered over all these years by the one constant I have known, the horses and my Ham. And so I, in this moment, looking back and afraid to lose it all, find my world upside down all over again. But I realize as well that such shaking up of things is life in a nutshell and the changes I've feared may just be the ones I need. I don't know what will happen from here on in, not for me, not for Ham...not for anyone really. But I refuse to be afraid any longer.
“You tore this,” I said, “that night, remember?”
“It’s very little,” he said.
“A laceration nonetheless.”
I looked down at my chest, at the place where my shirt was torn. He’d reached up, excited, from below my body, moving to remove the blouse but tearing it instead. At the time, it’d been sexy, but looking back now, looking down at my chest, the finger-sized hole in my navy blue blouse seemed only a reminder of another tear. Of the navy blue hole in my rose colored heart.
I was ten years old when my mom and I began to look for a horse. For several years prior to that, I had ridden and leased a myriad of horses from Andrea, my first instructor. There was Kingston, with whom I learned to post; Benji, with whom I learned to canter; Yankee, with whom I learned how to fall off; Premier, with whom I learned to stay on despite his efforts at unseating me; Pickles, with whom I learned the intricacies of a bouncy trot; and Victoree, with whom I learned how to play horse show.
My relatively short term relationships with each of the aforementioned horses prepared me for the commitment of owning my own and after several years, my mother and I ventured forth to find me a Morgan of my very own. We drove around New England, my mother with her camcorder and me with my optimism. I think my pickiness was surprising because at one point, after I'd vetoed yet another prospect, my mother turned the camera on me and said, "What is it exactly that you are looking for in a horse, Allie?" We have this on tape, me sitting in the passenger side of her Volvo, responding to the camera as one would answer the question of an ESPN correspondent, "Someone who is serious, committed, and who wants to work with me as much as I want to work with them," I replied.
When we met Barry in early November, I announced that the search was over, I'd found my partner of choice. Such is not to say that he didn't put me through the ringer. In fact, for an entire year following our initial meeting, Barry would stop dead between the second way trot and canter and refuse to move forward, backing away from my insistent leg pressure. Initially, I was completely disappointed. "How could this happen to me?" I wondered, discovering then that if something looks to good to be true, it usually is. What I know now, and couldn't know then, is that, perfection is overrated; it is more desirable to weather a complicated storm and come out that much stronger and more appreciative of calm seas, than to float forever on docile waters, going nowhere in the process.
In any case, the challenge Barry presented was solved only through creativity and a method of compromise developed with the help of my trainer Judy, to whom we had moved, hoping she could help. Help us she did, and Barry and I developed into a team, moving around our points of conflict rather than trying to force our way through them. Our teamwork was reflected in our show ring success. Likewise, when my adolescent increase in height matched up with a maturation of my riding style and it became time for Barry and I to go our separate ways, we did so with love and acceptance, albeit many tears on my part…and indifferent looks on his.
But then, I met Ham. My true love, a true partner, an animal ushered into my life because of the bond I'd made with Barry and the lessons we had learned. Through my teamwork with Barry, I'd grown as an individual rider, becoming ready for a more mature partner, a partner like Ham. In trying to convince my parents of this point, I composed an essay, purposefully entitled, "Why Cabot Courage Command is the Horse for me," in which I asserted that, "he matches me in desire and work ethic, and is the most beautiful animal I've ever seen." My belief in him proved positive, although, as with Barry, we certainly had our challenges, particularly because that which we grappled with as individuals was mirrored by our trials as a team. Nevertheless, our relationship has been one in which we've both grown, coming together to achieve great goals. And even though these days we spend most of our time apart, each of us having focused on other areas, people and pursuits, he is forever in my heart and mind.
Ok, so what does all this back story have to do with reflection on the present? Stay with me, here is the tie in. Last night, walking home in the heat and observing the disparate love affairs that litter Manhattan's streets this time of year, I got to thinking about the initial stages of a relationship; any kind of relationship. It's about getting to know someone, trying them out if you will, just as it was so many years back when I rode a multitude of different horses, learning something new from each one, and assembling those experiences into an idea of what I did and did not want in a partner. So although my girlfriends and I oftentimes bemoan the annoyance of disappointed hopes and the fear that builds when it comes to our love interests, maybe we just need to adjust our angle. With each date, with each brief affair or each year of a committed relationship, rather than ask how we can control the other person, perhaps we should wonder what we're learning about ourselves. What are we learning about what we do and don't want in a partner? I think the modern day myths that promise a "one and only" can sometimes serve to obscure the fact that each encounter, no matter how brief, is a gift. I think about the guys I've known and the friendships and heartache they've left me with, and I realize that, without all that, I'd not be so far along the road to realizing what it is I really want. Somewhere though, I've known it all along. Maybe, for me, it's just easier to identify when talking about a horse.
"Someone who is serious, committed, and who wants to work with me as much as I want to work with them…"
There’s this odd thing that happens in New York City. Maybe it happens everywhere else as well and I’ve just been here for so long I’ve forgotten, but for weeks, sometimes whole months on end, the moon disappears. Her absence almost always coincides with an unsettled feeling within me. Or maybe her absence affects that feeling. Either way, the moon goes away and I am restless, unsettled, discontent.
For a while now, the city sky has been empty. Likewise, I’ve been moving through life on edge, feeling more a passenger to the daily wave of Manhattan’s movement, than an agent of its momentum.
This has been one of the hottest weekends New York has seen in years, and has certainly constituted the first heat wave of the summer. I’ve spent it in a bit of a funk, perhaps partially due to the lack of air conditioning in my small and brick oven like box of an apartment, but for other, inexplicable reasons as well. I haven’t been able to escape a sense of expectancy, as if I am full to the brim with some feeling in need of expression and without any avenue through which to find it. It’s easy, in such cases, to expect the key to said expression to come from an outside source: the object of your affection, your friends, your finances, your vodka soda – the list goes on. I realize this, I realize this as I fall into it, knowing from experience that it’s a dynamic that needs to be humored, weathered and then released, and only in that order.
So it’s been a painful past week or so, waiting for this funk to pass. And I’ve done what I can to ease the waiting. I’ve gone out a bit, shopped in moderation, wandered the aisles of Fairway, etc. Today, for example, following last night’s low key evening of cocktails and girl talk with one of my best friends, I slept until two, before treating myself to Starbucks, and a movie. Maybe it was the copious exposure to air conditioning, maybe it was the iced frapuchino or whatever it was called, but I walked out of the cinema this evening feeling like the frustrated clouds of confusion that have colored the past two weeks, were finally rolling away. So I wandered a bit, testing out the waters of my emotional shift, walking up sixty ninth street to Columbus and stopping on my way to buy flowers, a weekly habit I surrendered years ago out of financial necessity. Nevertheless, it remains a decadent and delightful way in which I treat myself….even if these bodega bought blooms only last for three days before drooping.
Anyways, on the way home, turning the corner of 71st street, bouquet in hand, I looked up and saw the moon, reappeared in a crescent incarnation and sitting like relief, low in the sky. Like my awkward mood, like the feeling of expectancy and the inescapable waiting period necessary to go through for it to pass, she was back in Manhattan’s sky, a return that coincided with my own.
It’s a reassuring thing, the constant change that comprises our lives. Like the way this hot weather descended upon the city, oppressive and bearing down upon us, affecting anger and annoyance. But as I write this, the thunder is rolling in and a summer storm approaches, heralded in by change and promising to the break the heat. If only for a little while.
Ode to an Owl~
Tonight I did a month's worth of laundry, loading up several washers, feeding my ten dollar bill into the change machine with chagrin. I cleaned three sets of sheets, twelve pairs of panties, my favorite jeans and, for the first time ever, my long standing stuffed animal, Mr. Owl.
He is small, Mr. Owl, and speckled grey. His furry feathers, once fluffy, have become matted with time’s passing, with each hour spent pressed into my sleeping chest. Lately, my dog Calvin has taken to removing Mr. Owl from my bed and dragging him down onto the floor. Covered in slobber and looking rather bedraggled, it seemed to me that Mr. Owl was finally in need of a bath.
So into the hamper he went with the laundry, down to the basement, and into the wash.
When I transferred my wet clothes, by the armful, to the dryer, I checked him over, ensuring that the rinse cycle hadn’t done him in. He was soggy, but markedly cleaner, smelling less of slobber, sweat and tea rose, and more like Mountain Breeze detergent.
I shuffled downstairs on the last leg of my laundry chore, arriving seven minutes early. So I sat there, perched on a washing machine, and watched my clothes circle round, tossed in concentric cycles of color.
And then, there was Mr. Owl, pushed to the forefront by a wad of bedsheet, flying around the dryer, wings flapping and squat form flipping himself over and around. It was a comical sight, to see how freely he bounced, reverberating off walls of cycling clothing. I laughed at him then, sitting alone in the laundry room, Indian style on machine number four. Me and Mr. Owl, old friends.
“I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke lose on the wind” – P. Neruda.
Bright greens and pristine waters
Crisp breezes
And clean all around
And this cabin on a lake
If you had left us nothing but this
It would have been a world of enough
It would be just right
Couldn’t
And in trying to give it all
You poisoned it at the roots.
Up from Fulton Street
Late
One New York City night.
Across from me
Sat a mother and daughter
Dreadlocked
And embracing
Sleeping
And a portrait of love
Their entwined arms encompassing
Inclusive
And me across the car
Hungry
And made safe by their circle
This legacy
This land
This intersection of skin
Your body into mine
The planting of this seed
The inherited repetition
Of these days
Reflecting back to me
In a blur.
When, in times to come,
I look for them in memory’s mirror
Soon I will be twenty two years old.
That sounds old.
I feel young.
I am numerically advanced, but have yet to have a boyfriend.
I’ve yet to…well I can’t think of anything else that I’m “supposed” to have done by this point, but somehow, the perpetually single thing feels like a big one.
A big glaring sign, broadcasting my freak status to the rest of the committed relationship settled world.
Thing is, when you’re single, and the rest of your age group isn’t, it can get lonely. Which is maybe why a myriad of successes, accomplishments, and personal growth spurts are easily eclipsed by said singleness.
Spring in
We also watched the groups of old people, set out on park benches beside their caretakers, soaking up the sun their younger counterparts sprout and bloom beneath.
You.
Like you will someday.
Someday, with your wife and a blonde haired baby boy
Who sits on your lap.
Who looks out the window.
Who says, “Look daddy, clouds,” and points.
The You I sat by,
The father, the boy,
Had hands like yours.
Bony and pale,
With wide veins that ran atop them like roots.
Like gopher tunnels atop the skin.
For those few small hours,
Held his son.
And later on,
Slipped into half sleep with the child in his hands,
And picture books balanced atop his knees.
And pretty.
She held her son and said, “I love this boy so much,”
She was like yours will someday be.
Will someday be fresh and pretty.
The Push Pull Phenomenon~Don’t get me wrong, I love my dog. But sometimes, he positively epitomizes typical characteristics of the male sex (evidence to the argument that gender roles aren’t solely socially constructed…but that’s another essay)
I’ll be sitting at my desk, settled in my chair, typing away and Calvin will come sit right at my feet to stare up at me imploringly with beautiful black button eyes.
Because we are so well acquainted, Calvin and I, I know this look is not asking me to feed him, or to take him out but is more a “let me curl up in your lap to love and be loved” look. For Calvin, life in a human’s lap is a deeply embedded biological desire. He’s bred for it. His ancestors adorned the laps of everyone from Marie Antoinette (who supposedly gave the breed it’s name…girl was good at turning phrases) to King Henry III (yikes) to Madame de Pompadour (probably the best choice of the three). I love that in my wanderings round the Met, particularly through the Robert Lehman wing, I’ve come across several grand accounts of royal family life, complete with little Papillions seated demurely in their ladies laps.
In short, in Calvin’s rather limited world, my lap represents a certain fulfillment of his life’s purpose. So it really makes sense that he so ardently desires to be in it. Which gets me back to the point that I started out with--the way in which my little dog behaves in a similar fashion to other, human, males in my life.
When Calvin sits there, on the floor, staring up soulfully at me, I smile down and ask, “Do you want to come up?”…he keeps staring. I reach down to lift him into my lap and what does he do? He scampers off, turns around, looks at me, and scampers in the opposite direction. “Fine” I say and turn back to my work. A few minutes later, however, he’s back to staring. The process repeats itself. “Fine”, I say, and turn back to my work. Tired of playing games, when he again comes and sits at my feet to stare, I ignore him. When he realizes his attempt at my attention has failed, he hops from the couch to the bed and sits on the edge of my mattress, right behind my chair, and stares some more. If you’ve ever tried to work with someone looking over your shoulder, you’ll understand why this absolutely doesn’t work. So I cave, I give into the request on his terms and turn the chair to face him. Only then will he hop from the bed, onto my lap, to curl up and snooze contentedly for a while.
It’s the old “push pull” syndrome worked out in canine form. He does it with his own kind too. We’ll be walking along, and towards us will come another canine-human pair. If the other dog perks up, interested and alert, Calvin feigns indifference. Once that dog has passed by however, Calvin does a complete 180, intending to follow the now disinterested animal down the street. Likewise, should another dog seem disinterested in him, Calv is all ears and eyes, fixated on the elusive other.
Let me paint a parallel situation for you, just to exemplify the connection my little dog’s actions have to those of his human counterparts. This is a fabricated example, although, one that is assuredly well founded. Girl and guy are in class together. Guy thinks to himself that girl is hot. Girl thinks guy is hot and suspects he thinks he is as well. As such, she warily and wisely ignores him. Guy’s interest grows, fueled by the girl’s indifference, perhaps because it poses a challenge of sorts. She notices him noticing her so is unsuprised when he finally gets it up to comment on her outfit, or something smart she said in class discussion. Girl is glad…everyone wants to be appreciated. Guy and girl strike up a conversation and leave class together. Girl gives guy her number. They part ways. Girl waits and wonders. Guy waits until the next day dawns before sending a text...nobody wants to seem desperate. Girl receives and is excited. She checks the clock, counts ahead four hours and decides that she will text at that point….again, nobody wants to seem desperate. As this dynamic goes on, and as the two get to know each other and eventually begin to hook up, one of the two, the girl most likely, starts to like the other, or to think she likes the other, more than the other wants to reciprocate. Once the more interested party feels this increase of emotional attachment, waiting the requisite four hours before returning a text becomes much more difficult than before, as does wondering for days on end when next she will hear from the guy whose attention she’s now invested in. On the flip side, the less interested party, having now solved the mystery of what the other looks like without her clothes on, is demonstrably less interested in the mystery of the back and forth text messages, when they’ll arrive and what they’ll have to say. What is more, because the other is more interested, the aforementioned texts come more often. Suffice it to say, the relationship fizzles, leaving the female party upset and feeling vulnerable for having put herself out there and undesirable for being rejected. These feelings are strong at first, giving way with the passing of a few weeks, to anger. This anger causes a cessation of all contact between the two, be it telephonically or in class where the girl ignores the guy with a nonchalant air of indifference, smiling and talking with other people, making clear that the hooking up that once was, really meant nothing at all. This lull in contact between the two goes on for a while before the guy finds himself wondering where the “other” went to. Ergo, he sends a text. The recipient of said text is at once satisfied, angry and intrigued by the reinstatement of contact. And so the process starts again.
In the same way that Calvin is invited into my loving lap only to run, the guy in the above situation balks at the girl’s attention and the attachment it alludes to. Once she seems less invested however, he becomes more. Push pull.
A marriage to myself in a wedding gown made of bloodless white veins,
The insides of an orange,
Laced about my skin.
And dark blue of my pen,
Pulling itself in concentric circles over the orange peels
And tattooed in their place.
Dark blue henna, by my pen,
In preparation for a marriage to myself
Tonight the sun set like a blood orange in the sky, bleeding red and rusty over the blue. I saw it out my kitchen window while I washed a head of lettuce, red leaf and dirty. This house, my life, is set on a hill, deep seated in a long row of other beach cottages, ornamented with sunburnt front porches and unkempt lawns. But we all overlook the water, a wide California sea whose waves hold together the seam of earth and sky, stitching the two into one at the horizon line and adorning their union with layers of sea shell pink clouds.
At first this place…was like he was, soft and fluttering in my mind and in my body, like a warm yellow washing over me, each time lasting long after he closed my door behind him. It was a crazy love, one that swallowed me whole. And I'll never know if I was in it alone, even if I asked him, I'll never know.
People wonder what I do here all alone, how I spend my time. It seems inconceivable to them that I could have things to do. Maybe I don't, maybe I'm still doing nothing…but it doesn't seem that way. I go for long walks and let myself sink into the sand. I spend silent evenings on the front porch, cool and blue in the twilight…just like I am.
And I look at myself differently, settled in my solitude. My body is beautiful for it, glowing in its owner's recognition and undivided attention. I still shave my legs, all the way to the dips before my hips, even though I know no man will feel their softness, even though I can't remember what it feels like to want one to.
I've been here for a year, the most of which has been spent coming back to life, feeding my brittle body with ocean water. The third night I spent in this house, I walked down to the water and waded in, sitting heavily at first, where the sea meets the land. I let it caress me then, from the tips of my toes to the top of my head and everywhere in between. It was a surrender, sexual and serious, but effortless, the way it must be for animals, the way it can't be with a man.
The difference between us is embodied by this place, this California so foreign to Manhattan, so spacious and so soft. The change is in my body, in the muscles in my back once as dry and knotted as the roots of New York's sidewalk planted trees.
We had met in the springtime, as stereotypical lovers do. I'd overlooked his failings accordingly and likewise, he had put me up on a pedestal. I fell hard into a love I thought could hold me, sinking down deep into hope like one falls into a hammock, fully and with an entirety of form. And then, the hammock gave way and I landed hard on my ass where I stayed a while, shocked and windblown, before picking up and moving forward.
So here I am now, standing over the kitchen sink with a head of lettuce, a setting sun and Joni Mitchell singing For Free somewhere in the background.
