Sometimes I don’t know whether I am crying for him or for me. But I know that it is possible to live without being loved only for so long. And I know that the parts of ourselves that go unloved, become parts we ourselves do not know how to love properly. I know these parts of ourselves emerge twisted, shrunken. Begging for love but abhorrent of it.

I know that we are all of us Estella in Great Expectations, telling our guardian, you have raised me to fear the light. You have raised me to be afraid of love.

I know that my face said contempt to him when I did not feel it. I know that he was looking for reasons to feel ashamed and he found them. We humans, we are so intrepid. We do not stop until we find what we are looking for.

I know that I was looking for confirmation that I had been right to shun the world. I suspect that when he tried to lift me to my feet he was not trying to point out to himself and me and the world that I am too heavy for him to lift. I suspect that fat bottomed girls is just a song he sings with his friends, and not a thing he thinks about me, exactly. But here I am. The person on the other side of the action. Existing.

I know that to boys love is weakness and caring is girly. And I know that boys hate the boy who is soft and loving and caring and emotionally needy. I know that we are all taught to never be needy. Even when we need.

My parents treated me like a piece of luggage or like a disappointing play. I measured my worth by As and friends made or lost and successes that were somehow never enough. I tried to earn my safety from them, but failed. I failed to learn in all that time that safety is not a thing you can earn. It has to be a thing that you claim.

Now I max out my credit card buying supplements and candles and fleece blankets and flannel pajamas trying to convince myself I am safe.

I want to be safe enough for him to be safe with me. Even if the only part of himself he ever gives me is the soft caring weak part. Sometimes the girl wants to be the hero, too. I always wanted to be his hero. Maybe that’s all I have ever tried to be, this whole life of mine that I have messed up so completely.

I work when I can, but I don’t work. My life does not work. My life does not really do much of anything. I say it does. I try. I say things. But-

I didn’t ride horses growing up. I mean yes I rode horses. But really, the horses raised me. I speak horse the way some people speak human being. Like they were raised to it. Like it’s their native language.

I told the horses all my dreams and cried real tears in their stalls when no human was looking. I only feel safe when no human is looking.

The horses treat me like their physically disabled, sentimental, soft-hearted, unassertive, dismaying cousin. They see me more clearly than any human being and maybe more clearly than I will let any human see me. The horses press close and sniff my hair and do not demand anything from me. Except that I listen and love them and do not hurt them. When I speak horse incorrectly, when I drop a vowel or forget a phrase, they are not mean to me. When I am a human, the language does not even exist to say what I mean. Or the language exists, but when I speak it is so slow. Painful. And then the moment is gone and I am speaking to my own reflection only.

The horses are domesticated but there is something inside them that is untouched and free. Something that comes to the surface when I talk to them. Something real, a meaning carried through between the species.

The horses are domesticated. I felt he was trying to domesticate me. And so like a horse would, I ran away. Like any prey animal would before an animal who approached me with predation on his mind.

I want to be loved, not fenced in. People say it would be better for me, but I don’t think so. I think I owe the horses something. A free mind that knows the difference between a cage and a house.

I told my secrets to the horses, and then I walked away. They did not belong to me. I could not take them with me where I was going.

I am not a horse. He could have taken me with him. He chose not to.

My friend in my MFA class wrote about another life of hers, “when you are a bird and I am a mango tree.”

There is another life somewhere out there where the skinny, spindly little kid he must have been once is running around with the crazy lonely desperate girl I used to be, and they are happy. Maybe.

I think my life exists somewhere, in some alternate universe. Where I go when I dream. For now, I love like a horse, and other people love like trying to cage each other in. Like cages are necessary to help each other grow, like cages are justified, like controlling each other and repressing our scary memories and policing our emotional expressions out of existence keeps each other safe.

I miss the horses. I miss the girl I could have been. In a generation that defined love differently.