To enter the stables is to enter a myth

*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism

(*artwork by Incé Husain)

Around horses, I’m a girl again. Or rather, I’m that raw thing that stayed constant in me since my first memory. I’m some fundamental intactness without which I would be alien to myself. I’m a soft, delicate, shy glee, an aching wilderness.

X said, when we walked beneath the hazy glare of the full moon: “I took you to the stables every day when you were a baby and you would touch the heads of all the horses.” There is no documentation of this imprinting - no photos of me, no feelings I remember. Instead, the proof is in my certainty: horses always were, just like my name always was. I don’t remember learning them at school or from picture books the way I learned other animals. I remember asking for them always - horse books, horse films, horse plushies, horse figurines, horse photos, horse games, unicorn myths, Pegasus myths, horse magic and mayhem, ascendance to the imaginary realms they ruled. I was not a child obsessed but a child incomplete. I conjured them in any form I could, sketchbooks filling.

Now, I find Y at the stables and meet horses again, the first time in seven years. I smell them immediately. A scent like sweat but fresher, stronger, warmer, larger, and an earthiness, like liquorice. I see the gold hay bustling out of the stables, like frayed hair on concrete. To enter the stables is to enter a myth. I feel, always, a cosmic union.

The first clydesdale I see is massive, my head at his rippling rust shoulder. He barely looks at me, is out of reach in his wood stall, but I look at his large orb eye, feel its charge. Y and I wander deeper, past clydesdales in uniforms of black leather ridged in silver, surrounded by people on benches who brush the horses’ coats and braid their manes with a practical rush. In another stall, a brown clydesdale is restless, hooves benignly smashing the ground in hollow staccato stomps, almost monstrous as the muscled cords of her body stretched, thick neck arching. She calls in a rich, shivering timbre, a desperate, sweet trilling. I almost see the whites of her eyes, the flash of teeth beneath uncurled velvet lips, but there is a calmness, a certainty beneath the agitation, like the agitation is a game, a casual boredom.

“What’s her name?” asks Y.

“Alia. She’ll be fine,” says a woman nearby, who watches the mare toss her black mane with whimpering stomps. “She just wants her mate. He’ll be back soon, in the stall next to hers. Then she’ll relax.”

“Where is he?” I’m about to ask, but then the woman tells us Alia’s been snacking on peppermints. She might like apples later, once she’s performed in the arena.

The indoor arena is circular and filled with trampled dirt. The stands are nearly empty. Y and I take front row seats. The horses arrive trotting, adorned in black and silver leather, eyes hooded and faces riddled with reins, tethered to small open carriages on which the riders perch. The clydesdales strut, pulling hooves to their knees, walking when they’re told, trotting when they’re told, circling the arena, ears perked. Some are strained, froth flying from their mouths as their chests rhythmically tighten and loosen over glossy bones. They are awarded first to seventh place. A horse owner tells me that clydesdales are sweet, gentle, hardworking.

“They want to please. They want to be put to work. They enjoy this stuff. And most of the award rankings are on the basis of how happy they look, how proud.”

I wonder about this, how to know what horses like, how to share life with them. I think about what I’ve intently watched - carriages drawn by animals at different speeds with regal struts - and how I likely wouldn’t have found this intuitively captivating had it been any animal other than a horse.

I remember wanting to be a jockey when I was a child, or a show jumper, because it was the closest I could come to fusing with the momentum of a horse - to share the physical, mortal power of a being that could race the wind and face athletic challenge with intelligence and character. Horses bond, soothe, listen, confess. The  human-horse friendship is fully, viscerally real; personalities will ricochet, fuel, dare, love and wound each other. The bond has complexity, humor, routine, recognition. I have never had a horse, never learned to ride; I know about this bond through books and films and by looking into horses’ eyes. I feel it palpably in the air around me. I think: How much stronger I would be if I were an equestrian, how fortified, how capable of transcending pain and replacing it with the presence of this vaguely telepathic being, who may wound me like a friend but can never harm me like a human.

In the hour of intermission before the next show, Y and I buy milkshakes and grilled cheese sandwiches and wander the stables again. I smile at a group of people who I later learn are horse owners. We pause near a stall with a black mare. I watch her silently, her coat catching the light in undulating waves of silver. She’s massive, standing straight and self-possessed. I learn that she mashed an equestrian’s leg to pulp with her hooves because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, spooked her by mistake.

The owner notices me, says: “Come. I’ll take her out so you can pet her.”

The mare lowers her heavy ebony head into my hands. I see my reflection in her large eyes, a gossamer figure with an outstretched hand, a spherical film over rectangular pupils that ebb to dark orbs, like I’m encased in a glassy marble. She blinks heavily, her lashes long and thick. I can feel the soft vessels of her face beneath my palms, like warm bubbles. The cosmic union, for today, is complete. I can feel the sun’s heat in my hair and in the mare’s hair; I feel our time-paralyzing telepathy. She moves her head slowly from side to side, her waxy velvet nose grazing one of my shoulders then the next, a soft, curious interrogation. The cords in her neck are relaxed, attentive; she is meaty, angled fur, her breaths easy huffs against my chin. Her ears twitch - perking up, rotating, flattening, rising again.

I ask the owner questions about the mare: What’s her name? Is there a way she likes to be stroked? How do I interpret her moods through her ears? Does she like performing? Does she like trail rides?

I map our imagined future, stuff lifetimes into seconds. And I think, too, with the lilting strangeness that has come to seep into all my glee, follows it like a shadow, that is bred from incomplete impulses of rebellion, futility, and immortality; that grows larger with each minute of genocide and silence and time spent buoyed by the world order; that coats like a wrecked, insistent skin; that is a demand spoken, embodied, and unleashed in the niche of my life; a prayer and a celebration and the reawakened fibre of my spine: Yes, beauty is key, joy is key, and it must be seized, I’ve taken a militant approach to life. No, I will not write emails in the sun, I will see horses that transfix time and make me young; no, I will not let the institution rule me from afar, I will make chai and thrive off people I see once a year; no, I won’t compromise, I’ll seize what I need with sincere exonerating compassion. A good day is one where I have felt, savoured, and documented so I don’t forget and so I relive; and this proof of life is not distraction, it is key, it is the embodiment of what I fight for and what I write for, a calling of “you too shall have this glee, mark my words, there will be no injustice soon”. This glee is a part of the free world that is coming, and to feel it is a reminder: I must savour it so I remember what I must help deliver. Nothing is futile and my vision is clear.

The mare is led away from me and her hair is braided in red and white ribbons. Black and silver leather clasps her like armor. She paws at the ground calmly, readying herself for the arena. ♦