All of my departures have introduced me to new versions of myself but I’m beginning to resent the idea that there is still so much left to become. I am hoping crossing borders will show me what love has yet to grant me: freedom.
I arrive in New Mexico hoping to better acquaint myself with service and solitude, to become more discerning and lighthearted. The farm is in a town checkerboarded between reservations and gas stations. Everything here is brown and low to the ground. The adobe houses look like they have been pushed gently down into the earth by a large hand, like the ground was choking on houses made of sand. Mountains hold the pueblo between the river and the canyons. Cottonwoods follow along the roads and dried arroyos. Every afternoon clouds gather above to perform the theater of thunder without rain.
The farm is owned by a small and resilient Native woman named Marta. She wears floral dresses and sandals so that her feet are always covered in dust and dirt. Her hair hangs in two long braids to her waist and her hands are weathered by rope and wire and clay and animals and whatever accumulation of mistakes eventually begins to resemble a beautiful and hard life. She has five horses, two dogs, one barn cat, twelve chickens and had had three husbands. She never looks at me when she says their names. She remembered them architecturally through the pieces they left behind on the property like the gate or the screen door.
In the morning, I walk to the barn carrying coffee in a thick diner mug I bought in town at the coffeeshop. It has a black hawk on it. I like collecting mugs from local coffeeshops like this so that when I return home and notice them sitting on my shelf, I know where I’ve been. The horses wait in the bright light, their eyes holding small white reflections of daybreak. I let them out to pasture, feed them alfalfa and hay, check the troughs, fill the wheelbarrow with manure and wet straw as fast as I can to get ahead of the heat.
The work repeats itself with purpose. The horses need water and salt because it is hot. They need food because they are hungry. They move away from pain because pain hurts. Their needs are familiar to my own. I’m a collection of movements. I practice indifference and patience while dragging my feet. My arms tan, my hair lightens and my muscles tone each day. At night I stand naked in the shower and watch brown water rush off my body in delicate rivers between the grooves of stained porcelain tile. Sometimes the brown turns red and I search myself for a cut. I find it and touch it and feel it sting. Several days later it becomes another thin white scar and I think this is the body archiving time and time is violent without permission.
What would it feel like to hear you forgive yourself:
I’m sorry… I don’t know what I was thinking… I’m afraid but I’ll do it afraid…
You taught me something I wish I didn’t know which is that a person can recognize his fear and still submit himself to it. You said you didn’t have the wherewithal to see it through. Wherewithal. I keep thinking about the word. Wherewithal. It’s so heavy in my mouth. Makes it sound like love requires technique.
Imagining you, reaching into your pockets and finding yourself short of some necessary and yet imaginary equipment. You could describe your fear in every possible way except as fear. You turned it slowly in your hands, studying every damaged and chipped surface and then calling it something else: timing, capacity, context, reality or whatever bullshit you gave me. You hurt me and remained the most wounded person in the room and the worst part was that I understood. Understanding is the most degrading talent I possess. Please relieve me of all this goddamn forgiveness I carry.
Marta teaches me how to clean the horses’ hooves. I stand beside the palomino, Summer, facing her tail and run my hand down the long bone of her leg until she shifts her weight into me. I squeeze the tendon above the fetlock and she lifts her hoof into my hand. I cradle the hard black crescent of her hoof between my knees and scrape away packed mud with a pick. Underneath everything is a pale and tender triangular softness, hidden beneath six hundred pounds of horse.
“Don’t dig into that.” Marta says. “It’s sensitive.”
I’m protecting what is soft and strong.
A horse will show the whites of its eye when she’s hurt. She will raise her head and tighten her body before running away. Her fear travels visibly through her body and after the danger passes and when her fear subsides she will lower her head back to the grass and grazes. She can return after being frightened like that.
The wind comes down from the mountains in warm gusts smelling of juniper. I sit beneath a dead cottonwood, watching ants march over my boots. I hope to become one with the bark. I feel the ache of my body mimicked in the tree’s deadened limbs.
I wish I had answers and maybe that’s where my blame lies; in not knowing what question to even ask, only to feel everything pass through me like wind itself. I’m honest with presence and there was none of you here.
You had been less than earnest when you told me you loved me while becoming your own worst enemy and I try to hate you for this but hatred turns out to require a tremendous amount of imagination. I only miss you. I see you, up against the wall, inside yourself and I feel you so lonely too.
The grief keeps collapsing beneath the weight of what I know, which is that you are scared. I remember you so easily, from before your hope calloused beneath fear. Perhaps because your courage and joy meant the most to me out of everything and everyone on earth.
I remember the white scar on your hand, the names you called me, your cowlick, your fingers in my mouth, the animated silence when I kissed your cheek and then your jaw and then your chin and then your nose and then your cheek again because I could never finish kissing your face. I never want to stop loving you.
Some evenings I call my cousin John while he drives home from work and I can hear the turn signals in his car and the cars honking on the street battering the silence out here in the desert.
“Are you eating?”
“No.”
“You sleeping?”
“No.”
“You sound terrible.”
“I work on a farm now.”
“I know.”
I started to cry uncontrollably. John interrupted my panic to say:
“He’s a fucking pussy.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I think he was just afraid.”
“Well so is everyone.”
“He just gave up.”
“Convenient.”
I hate John for saying it and love him for saying it and so I stop calling him as often.
By the end of the summer, the nights sharpen and all I want is to forget. I just want to get it over with. I don’t want to miss you. I don’t want to hate you. I want to forget you like I know you are already forgetting me now.
Summer huffs from her stall, responding to a low, almost silent rolling sound or sensation that seemed to come from the earth beneath us. She turns her head and breathes across my shoulder and then bows and pushes her face towards my chest. In my head, I tell her stop and she does. I envy her ability to read minds. Marta enters behind me.
“She’s a good listener, isn’t she?”
I laugh and it surprises me how foreign it sounds to be lighthearted. I feel it catch in my ribs like an accident.
When the work is finished, I go back to the house and open a beer in the screened porch. I drink it slowly and then I drink the good tequila because tequila is quicker and I am tired of waiting. The wind stops suddenly and silence enters everything. The sky is painfully beautiful and I resent it because I am surviving with the impression that nothing should be allowed to look this beautiful while I feel this bad.
I miss you least when the night is far away enough from the day that all I feel is hatred. In the daylight, I love you so much that I make excuses for you and give you grace and then I give you some more. I have an infinite amount of grace for you which is an unfortunate thing to discover about oneself.
I would do anything for you. I would even let you go. Maybe especially that.
I pour another tequila. The first makes me relax. The second makes my blood boil. By the third I am sitting on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets replaying your words and deepening the wound with the original blade you lanced into me. I asked if you loved me and you went quiet and then finally you said:
“I should go… Yeah, I’m gonna go… Bye…”
I’m realizing that a coward avoids love by eventually fusing his lack of wherewithal with his identity. He will convince himself that he cannot accept love and eventually he will believe it to be a distraction from his true self: wounded, martyr, misunderstood, desperado, failure.
I wonder how much of a person is simply just the things they want but repeatedly refuse to accept out of sheer masochism or foolishness. For a moment I feel relief. I want to thank you for this blessing; for showing me your cowardice with so much resolve that I could almost certainly accept it as stupidity or pride and therefore wasteful but the horrible and simple truth is that I love you, in spite and regardless of your angst and frailty; even when you bear the most unfair and selfish malice towards me, I know you posses it more cruelly towards yourself.
The condensation from the cold glass, pressed to my cheek, bleeds into my tears. I put my boots on without socks and follow my hot head outside. The ground tips beneath me and the rocks shift underneath my boots. I notice the horses lift their heads and it occurs to me that they have never seen me drunk. I have the strange impression that they know this too. I climb the metal gate instead of opening it because opening it would require the sequence of small and sane gestures I am no longer interested in performing. The tequila splashes over my hand as I swing my leg across. I drop into the pasture hard enough that the earth reverbs into me. Summer stands near a cottonwood, her mane lifting slightly in the breeze as she watches me waltz.
Grasshoppers propel themselves from my path. I’m brazen out here tonight. The earth still holds the heat of the day and the dry grass kisses my legs with tiny soft brushes. I curve towards Summer’s shoulder so she can see me and I offer her the back of my hand. Her breath is warm and grassy. I notice the first star appear above the northern mesa although I think it might actually be a planet. I don’t know the difference and suddenly I don’t think knowing the names of things has helped me very much to begin with. I can only see the little point of light and how it crosses all that darkness just to touch the wet black surface of Summer’s eye. I run my hand along her neck and feel her dusty coat, somehow coarse and impossibly soft at once. I tell her I will give her a bath tomorrow. Beneath her coat I can feel the machinery of her. The muscle and bone in her enormous body manufacturing life without once having to think of it. Summer lowers her face into my waist, offering her head and so I stroke the white blaze between her eyes. She doesn’t move so I move closer. Everything is quiet but not silent, because true silence is impossible among living things full of blood like this. I feel the grass against grass. I hear metal cooling and ticking. My own heart behaving terribly inside my chest. I imagine the border between our bodies becoming thinner and being blood. I imagine sorrow leaving my body through my arms and entering her enormous skull and moving through her long back and down her legs through four black hooves and finally into the earth where hopefully it will become something useful like soil; anything but mine or at least rooted. I start crying quietly because I find it so humiliating. My tears fall from my face onto hers. I put both arms around the column of her neck and lean deeper into her warmth. I know not to embrace her this way, to hold too tightly or place my human need onto an animal and expect her to carry it, but heartbreak narrows the world until everything looks as though it posseses the exact dimensions of what I have lost, and for a moment Summer is the only warm body left on earth. And so I hold on and press my cheek against her. I think without knowing what I am asking for.
Please… Please… Please…
Then something moves behind her. There is no sound. Her head flies up and the white of her eye flashes. Every muscle becomes fear at once. She spins and I see one black hoof rise and then the other. The first hits the inside of my left knee. The second hits the outside of my right. Two blunt knocks and then flatness. First my shoulder and then my face hit the ground and dirt enters my mouth. For one second there is no pain, only the enormous fact of impact and the percussion of the herd scattering around me like traffic. I open my mouth and drag air over dirt. Something hot blooms inside both my knees. I am suddenly down here, on the level of grass and hooves and stones and shit.
The horses stand several yards away with their heads lowered, looking at me while I cough and groan and whimper. The world is on a tilt and I can feel my whole being shake. Even the mountains roar on their sides. I get onto my hands and knees and for a moment I cannot remember what people are supposed to do after being hurt. Stand? Summer’s hoof had torn through denim and skin. My hands shake so badly they rattle the metal fence when I hop it. At the top I sit astride the rail and look back into the pasture at the horses disappearing into shadows and for a moment I see myself still lying there in the dirt whimpering. I have been that girl. I am this woman and I feel equally boundless as both. I have infinite capacities.
I walk to the house without limping because I am in shock and shock is a magnificent liar. I grab an ice pack from the freezer and I sit on the kitchen floor and then whatever small structure had been holding myself together up until then falls apart. I fold onto the floor breathing loudly, one hand on my heart and the other moving through my hair until both hands find my ears and I cover them as if the sound is coming from outside of myself. I sob so hard none of my cries can finish before another one begins. They pile on top of each other unfinished. Broken breaths coming from somewhere more ancient than language. The scream takes the last air from me. I claw at the floor. Where did your love go? I fold over my knees but it hurts and so I fall onto my side. The blood smearing underneath me, my boots sliding in mud on the tile floor. I think I may be dying from this massive pain inside. The edges of the kitchen begin turning black and I realize with terrible fear that vision is something that can be taken away too. Nothing is real. I am suddenly so small. I did not know how small my body was until I tried to scream myself out of being. I put my face to the floor because the floor is cold and real and incapable of leaving, it collects my blood but does not absorb it.
I never knew love before you and now I know an immeasurable pain. I hate the mercy of understanding because I am lying here with my knees split open, knowing that soon they will become scars, while somewhere you are living a life where this night has not happened. I breathe in the smallest dose of air. I am still on the kitchen floor, wavering and yet optimistic because I will make my own body a scar and protect the softness within myself, while you are making whatever peace you can with the choice you made; knowing I will always forgive you.
Tomorrow I will wash the dirt out and limp for a few days. I will forgive Summer because she is a horse and because, unlike us, she has never pretended her fear was anything other than fear. I will watch the red become black become purple become yellow beneath my skin. I will lick my wounds because nobody else is coming to lick them. This is what becoming a woman has been trying to teach me all along; not how to avoid being hurt but how to be the animal that can survive it without becoming hard. I’m teetering the line between animal and woman here.
I know it’s true because I have no choice. I will come back soft in the same places I did when I fell in love, but the next time a man lets his fear decide for him, I will know what I am looking. I will know it to be weakness. I will know it to be the other side of love.
I am already falling in love again, laughing this time.
Summer has lowered her head, tearing the grass from the earth like an animal.
Ginger Jones is a poet from California.