The only thing I can do lately with any confidence is cross deep water on my horse.
I feel like everything is slipping through my fingers. My mom's mind, definitely her body, my dog's sore paw, b's sickness, b's son's sickness, heartsickness, Nathan graduating, Emma graduating and moving, Lilly becoming a senior, Bob Fosse still being dead, the summer coming, the end of every day.
My friend Rebecca wrote me at around 6 pm today and said why is this time of day so hard for me? Is it hard for you?
Exactly what I had been feeling.
It does feel always at 6 like the irreversible is happening. The day is closing. It's kicking us out of the bar. It's saying whatever you did never feels like enough but you can't stay here. At 4 o clock there is still so much time. I burned six eggs at four o clock because I forgot I was boiling them cause I was in the other room. At four o clock it's not that bad. I have a lot of eggs. I just started over. By six o clock though it is a damn tragedy.
I don't like when the sun has to go somewhere else for 12 hours. We love you sun. You light the way. You give us a path to follow. I guess if I lived in Scandinavia I'd feel maybe completely crazy and I'd never shut down because it's light all the time. But at least I wouldn't have this farewell to life every night when the sun decides to call it and leave.
Right when I'm in the middle of my life here.
So I get up the next day and if I have energy I take the horses out and sometimes I trick myself into going because I promised Kurt I'd go so I have to go cause he's waiting and then we get to the deep swirling water left behind by the tumult of winter rain and we spent months just looking at the water knowing it was too rushing deep and now we have been putting horse feet in there and in the last week or so we have been just barreling right down and through the water.
Today I crossed one river section that was a hole where I couldn't see the bottom and it was up past my horse's stomach and I thought ohhh you know what? if it's too deep she will just swim and then I realized all this worry about deep water is just top of the head worry, my horse will float and swim and the deep will be passed through and her feet will find the bank on the other side and we will get out of the water. And we will be on to the next water.
It is so freeing to bust into that water and not know if you have the skill to manage it. And then once you're in the middle of it to find that the worry on the bank beforehand is way worse than being in the middle of the water. The middle of the water is kind of quiet and fun. Because you're there, and there's nothing you can do about it anyway.
Maybe I should think about that with where I am in my life and in all my people's lives. We're just in the middle of the water. Who cares what happens. The hard part is getting in.
