upon seeing a sweatered horse on the highway

Emma Marion

The brilliance of a winter sun found a stage on her forehead, the proximal gloss of her chestnut coat glimmering for an instant before the wake of the coach bus erased her from my perception. Allowing my shoulder blades to rest again upon the upholstered seat, I attempted to stitch together the flash of fragmented observations. With these pieces of an image being instantaneously threatened by the fallibility of time and memory, I frantically recalled the way her ears flicked backwards at a perfect diagonal and how her wet black pupils were covered by eyelids lined by thick brown lashes. The element of this mare that was pulled into the spotlight of my memory, however, was the absence of a traditional horse blanket. Almost instinctively, I fixated on the gray knit sweater with a folded turtleneck that hugged the contours of her poised muscles. The horse sunning itself in this attire pulled a clumsy laugh from my gut, a reflexive reaction to an animal possessing a persona so humanesque.

There are two types of laughs: the type that is nourished by the responsive laugh of others and the type that echoes back, heard and understood by you alone. I discovered this laugh elicited by the sweatered horse to be the latter, losing momentum as silence inserted lactic acid into its force. Instead of other passengers’ eyes being alight with the sudden awareness of a simple joy, I was met with closed eyes, either asleep or possessing a mechanical deadness that relented no life or emotion.

More surprising than the loneliness of this experience was its familiarity. There was something about this tragic isolation, this ability to describe the sweatered horse off the side of the highway and the inability to make others see it as I had, that created a spiritual deja-vu.

***

The alcoholic elation that had been humming in a closed circuit between muscles and mind had faded into a drooping sobriety that weighed on my eyelids. I stumbled to the bed and nudged her with a gently closed fist, the other hand rubbing my eyelid to resuscitate sensual vitality. I sensed the corner of my mouth turn up slightly into a smirk responding to the limb lump of blankets she had become in my bed. She was always the first of my friends to go back after a night out.

The lump of blankets rustled and I replied to the gesture, “You can stay in my bed if you want, but can you move over?”

“Of course,” and the blankets swooped up above her extended arm as I crawled into the warm cavern that this motion created. I felt the blankets settle like dust upon my body, and I didn’t expect to see her as conscious as she was when I glanced over. Meeting my gaze, she said, “How was the rest of the night?”

“Fine, I’m sober and tired so I came back.”

“Me too.”

At this, we both giggled like middle school girls gossiping at the sleepover party.

The question was sudden: “Have you ever kissed a girl?”

“No,” I said as I felt my cheeks flush with rose. I had been out to my friends for over a year now, but the realization of my identity had come on an emotional basis, not a physical one. I did not have the physical experiences to back up this assertion about myself, and it was often a source of embarrassment. Her expression did not change, however, and she followed with a quick question, so smoothly sequenced that it had the impression of being calculated.

“Do you want to?”

I did, but another voice pushed away my own and choked out my own desires, “I can’t, we’re just friends.”

“That’s why it would be so funny. Who says friends can’t make out, it’s good for the plot.” Her voice then softened when she noticed that I was nervous, “We don’t have to though, I wouldn’t make you do something you didn’t want to do.”

I didn’t know how she realized I was nervous until I realized the indications myself. I was trembling gently, small tremors animating my hands and legs. The oddity of the situation was that I wasn’t nervous to kiss her. My desire to do so was resolute. I was shaking because I felt as though I was standing on the precipice of my own identity.

Beneath my feet stood certainty. The packed dirt was the 21 years of my life I spent chatting with my mother about boys on Sunday walks. The stones were the double, even triple dates, with my best friends and their boyfriends. The interspersed patches of mildly yellowing grass were my grandparents, aunts, and uncles, leaning in curiously around the holiday dinner table to hear about the latest male character that I had my eye on. The rubber soles of my shoes gripped to this dirt, these rocks, and this grass, afraid to step forward and leave them behind.

Over the edge stood the uncertain conditions that would come with fully realizing myself and what I desired. The jump, it turns out, was kissing her. I had the creeping intuition that once I jumped, there was no returning to the certainty that felt so solid and comfortable.

My own voice had regained its strength over fear’s voice which had possessed my tongue earlier, “No, I want to.”

The recollection of how exactly it happened was dispersed by the floating feeling in my chest that rushed over me as our lips met. The racing of my heart slowed, and in the natural way that her lips brushed against mine, I vaguely realized that this was the first time I didn’t feel like I was waiting for it to end or that I wasn’t biting back a laugh. It was smooth, and a previously unsung concerto mused in my heart. It was warm, gentle, and comfortable. I had jumped, but in the darkness I was caught by a net that I didn’t know was there, adrenaline fading from Existence.

I wanted to tell the world. I wanted to sing about how it had felt like the first time I got glasses, how I didn’t know I was living in a blur until reality was clear. I wanted to express how my haunted desires weren’t actually haunted, and had a reasonable explanation after all. I wanted to tell them how I finally understood, how I finally felt less like a stranger to myself. After I opened my glowing phone, however, I discovered that my frantic fingers were deleting more than they were writing.

Not a single message was sent.

My thumb hovered over the send button, and retreated in shame as I realized that I was afraid that this vein of life experience could become a personality trait that snuffed out who I really was to those I care about, or that by speaking about it they would feel as though I was throwing unsolicited gayness in their faces. I could not make them understand, because they did not have the same experience that I had. There were too many pitfalls in the path of understanding for me to expect them to sympathize with my own discovery or identity. I was Alone.

I was as alone as I had been laughing at a sweatered horse off of the side of the highway, my expression of amusement failing to be received. I have found that it’s easy to forget how lonesome you are until you have an experience that brushes upon being understood, and concludes with a near miss. You must come to peace with the idea that you may always be lonely, and that the illusion that others know who you are may be the price that you have to pay when you come to know yourself.

Upon seeing a sweatered horse off the side on the highway, your laugh alone may need to be enough.

Emma Marion is currently an undergraduate English student at Moravian University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, she now lives in Bethlehem and just recently finished my third year as an English student with a certification in secondary teaching.