1.

When I was eight years old, I went to a summer camp where I rode horses. Perhaps it was first there that I felt a sort of connection with them; or rather, the concept of them. A wild creature, brought over to a strange continent. Tamed. Broken. And ridden. So odd to have a partnership with one of them, to feel the nature—and lack thereof—beneath you.
At the camp my horse’s name was Salsa and Chips, and he was incredibly tall. Indelibly so. Of course, to most anyone, he would have been just another horse, but to such an indelibly short person at the time, he was a goddamn Clydesdale. He had a white blaze on his forehead and sometimes I spent a long time wondering about his name. Why it was so strange. It was playful, yes, but unnatural. I thought about it as I cleaned his quarters and fed him and felt, essentially, his life in my hands, despite the oversight of adults.
So I learned to ride him. Or, I learned as much as I could have in a week.
I learned he didn’t like to have someone boss him around, if he could help it, and I wasn’t so sure how I felt about that. I learned that he was ten times heavier than I was, and just about ten times faster, too, which was why the ground crunched like salsa and chips under his feet, and that made me feel a little better, when I felt his power. The name I supposed, made some sense.
I managed to learn my riding with minimal incidents. However, there were two occasions on which things did go a little bit south.
On the first such occasion, what I remember most is how sharp everything in the world seemed. There were sharp rocks littered across the torrid earth, and dried nettles and shriveled burrs, and there were even pointy tufts of thistles that bobbed in the easy wind, hissing and rattling the same way the snake does.  And of course there was the fence. A rusty old skeleton of a fence, barbed and collapsing on either side of the trail from the barns to the arena, and a child my size couldn’t help but think of how it would feel if one were to just slip…
A funny thing about me is, when I’m scared of doing something like that, really scared, I feel like I need to do it. It’s incredibly stupid, really. Like when I went to Italy and climbed the Duomo, which is an immense dome on top of the most famous cathedral in Florence. There were these stairs inside of the rounded top, and once in awhile there was a round hole for ventilation where  I could look down at the altar. And the whole time we were climbing inside this old, old cement structure, I was thinking: how poetic would it be if one day the cement just broke, and someone fell and landed right on the alter? Like right in the middle of the cross. Or would that be prosaic—is there even that much of a difference, anyhow? And so anyway, when we got to the top, we could go out on to the roof. Like onto a donut-shaped balcony, with all of Florence below us. And after all that goddamn stair-climbing I just found myself hugging the middle of the donut. Literally, I had my arms around the cylindrical stone outcropping, where the stairwell emerged, for the whole time, almost never looking over the edge. My sister made fun of me for it for years after. But what she didn’t know, though, was that when I was standing up there, all I could think was how wonderful it would be just to climb over and jump—like flying. It was a scary thought.
And so there I was, on the back of a horse, wind with its fingers lightly pulling, when I began to slip. The funny thing is, I never hit the ground. I grabbed onto my horse’s neck and held on for dear life. But since then, I can’t help but wonder: what if I had just let myself go?
The second incident was a little less contained. In fact I suppose that the event was almost a direct result of the first one. You see, Salsa and Chips liked to go fast, he liked it a lot. Being but an eight-year-old with only a few days of experience, I had trouble curbing the effects of this tendency. More specifically, I had trouble controlling the horse—especially because secretly, I liked to go fast, too.
That day we were in the arena, where the sand was watered down to prevent the dust from rising in its little hurricanes, and where jumps littered the center of the pen, striped and colored like a little horse carnival. It was as simple as this: Salsa and Chips wanted to go fast, so he did. And I let him. I felt something rising inside of myself and I wasn’t sure what it was, but all the wind in my face certainly made me think back the Duomo: how it would’ve felt if I’d jumped. I yelled—don’t laugh, I was eight. I didn’t go that fast again.
A year later, I heard from someone that Salsa and Chips was dead.

2.
In his book North of Boston, Robert Frost wrote a poem called “The Pasture.” He said,

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

He’s my favorite poet.

3.
Lots of things have happened to me in this life. It has been a strange one.
It was a different time when really I began to think. It was a strange time, a time that can really only be remembered in small, woozy flashes, and it has grown old and creaky and decrepit, like a haunted house, in my memory. All I can really see, when I think back, are lots of waists and knees and lower backs—blue jeans, shorts, sneakers and loafers. It was easier back then to dart between legs and through crowds, and it was easier to slip two tiny fingers under the lid of the candy jar and back out again before anyone could look. Sometimes, it was hard, too, hard to understand things that older people did and said. And it was a time that I realize now most people have not considered for a long, long while. It is ironic, then, I suppose, that it has shaped us more than any other era in our lives, this forgotten past. Or maybe it is the reason, that we forget it, that it shapes us.
It was a time when everyone understood me, but I didn’t understand them. It was a time when I was given all the love in the world, and received none of it, because I did not know, because I could not know. Back then, or before the death of Natasha Brownfield, I should say, things were different, simple. They just were the way they were, and I was fine with that. I let them tell me where to stand.
Stand here, in the front: you are small, and you cannot see. Stand here, by Daddy: you are young and you do not know how to behave. Quiet, child, quiet. These are somber times. (Somber?) Sad, darling, sad. Hush.
I remember that there were many people—or pairs of pants, rather, I remember those—standing in a room. There were small side tables, about the height of my flat little belly, with candles on them, and the ceiling light had been switched off by somebody tall, somebody who didn’t have to jump to get at the dimmer. Most of the adults were crying, and that was weird. Big kids didn’t ever cry, let alone adults—Jack Cheney from kindergarten told me that.
There were a few other kids in the room. My sister was there, and four more, the children of family friends. I wasn’t standing near them though; they were all girls, and older than me, too. Plus, Mommy had told me to stand still.
The adults were talking—not like the normal parties or conversations that I had overheard, though. They were talking one at a time, and once in awhile, one of their voices would crack, and there would be a long silence, aside from quiet sniffing and the mumbles of creaking floorboards as the adults each shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. I don’t remember much of what they were saying, because after all, I was young, too young to know we were gathered here together to wish a friend and mother of two goodbye. I looked at the center of the table, where a dish of gum drops sat, pleasantly colorful in the yellow-gray lit room. It looked painfully ironic. It looked... Somber.
Natasha never had a husband, I remembered hearing. She had raised her two children alone, and earned all her money, too. I had been in her house once or twice, and it was nice and big—she had done fine all by herself, just fine. When I asked my mom where Natasha’s babies came from, if they didn’t have a Daddy, she said they came from the same place a woman and a woman or a man and a man got a baby. They got an orphan, like in the movies.
Nat’s two little girls were there, sitting quietly on the couch and occasionally getting into little cat fights like siblings often do. They were one and three years older than I was, and mysterious to me.
Helen and Sara were the other two girls, two and three years older than I was. I got them. They giggled at the same things I did, and Helen, the one with the long, curly hair, said when we grew up we were going to start a business together and be millionaires. I believed her. My sister sat and played with them on the couch across from the Brownfields.
My feet were starting to hurt, so I sat down next to Mom. She shuffled her legs a little and I moved, carefully avoiding her pointy high-heeled shoes. Before we had left the house, I remembered, I had worn them around for awhile, screaming and tripping and stumbling, but a few inches taller nonetheless. She had made me take them off so she could talk to me. She told me I had to behave tonight. Be quiet. Respectful. Because Natasha had some disease—they called it the Can-sir, and I had heard of it before—and we were going to visit her with some close friends. She had about a week. Mom didn’t say that God would take Nat to heaven, and make it all right—my parents never forced any religion on me. I’m thankful for that. Sometimes, a kid needs the truth.
And when the talking was over, the quiet candle vigil, we broke up the quiet circle and began to mill around the house, which had been set up as if for some manner of party with bowls of dip and vegetables laid out on the tables untouched. It felt like the idea was that if we acted like it, we could really trick ourselves into believing she was just retiring.
The group dispersed and milled about, talking to one another in near-whispers that sounded harsh and abrasive inside the delicate house. And they began to take in tours. Like a zoo, or a museum full of bones. The adults went in first, in groups of no more than a few at a time, and for a long time the children waited, staring at the plain, whitewashed door. I thought of the door to the girl’s room in Poltergeist (which I had secretly watched at a sleepover, without the knowledge or consent of my parents), behind which there was a mysterious vortex that sucked you nearer and nearer the closer you came. It was strange, what went on in  my head: I didn’t know what I would see in there, and so I tried to imagine it, suffering. I couldn’t.
I sat and waited for a long time, tasting the adrenaline I felt pumping through an artery that was in my neck. Between each group, there was a several-minute break during which Natasha Brownfield could rest (why does she need rest? what does she do to them?) and regain her capacity to focus. They took all the children in at once.
It was bright in the room, and they told us to be quiet. Natasha Brownfield laid in a queen-sized bed, her head bald as ever. She smiled at us, and her teeth were slightly yellowed, like parchment. There was no point in brushing them, I supposed.
Nat, who I had met before, looked the same, but different. She had always been at our parents’ collective Stanford football tailgaters, which were awkward for me because of all the adults I didn’t know. She had had short hair since I could remember—something I had never understood, but knew had to do with the Can-sir—but her laugh was different, and her face was wan and slack.
She talked to us for awhile, and she was nice, just like I remembered. Pleasant. And strange. Because there was her face, smiling and sad, just level with mine, not her pockets. And I felt strange. She looked like she hurt, and I could just feel, as anyone could have, the sadness with which her suffering and ultimate passing was received. And yet I did not know her. I was detached, strangely detached, from this woman who smiled so.
(what does she do to them?)
The adult who was in the room with us, another woman, had a bowl of grapes. She asked Natasha if she wanted them, and Natasha said yes, she did; or mumbled, rather. And we looked on as the tall, orange-haired woman fed them to the lady in the bed, who before this moment had to me simply been a pair of worn green pockets. When the lady was done chewing, she spat the grapes back into the bowl. What’s the point of swallowing them if you were just going to puke it all back up?
Several days later (I don’t really remember how long it was, exactly), Mom called me over in the kitchen and took my hand. She sat down slowly, and told me the truth, that Natasha was dead. She cried, and hugged me, and I could do what I wanted with that information. I decided I wouldn’t believe in God.
And somehow, still I felt nothing. I saw my mother cry, and I felt for her, because she was my mother and I knew her, and I could see her in incredible sadness. But for Nat I was blank.  And I thought of myself: who am I, that I should not feel for this dead woman; even though I never really knew her, why can’t I cry? And it was the most complex thing that I had ever thought. I could not understand it, and I pitied myself.
Then I thought of her children, her orphans twice. I vowed ignorantly to never again waste a chance to know someone, to learn to love them, before they were taken. But for this it was too late, and the memory of her lying there, on the bed so close to the floor, her face brought down to level with mine as I stood against the wall, hurt me as much as it made me feel taller.

4.
There are a few times in my life where I’ve known what death felt like. It feels wrong to say that, almost disrespectful, but I’ve felt it. The sadness, the simplicity, the fear. Aloneness. I’m lucky—I’ve had everything anyone could need, and more, given to me—and there are those who suffer more than I do, certainly. But of course death is not only for the poor, or for the weak, or the oppressed. Its strange ubiquity is a billion times as immense as that of life.
The feeling isn’t just terrible, either. It’s a rush, too, like for one moment you’re an adrenaline junkie jumping off a cliff, and where you’ll land, you can only guess… and hope.
Life is full of death. No, life is part of death. Before there was life, there was death, and there will be after. We’re just here for a little bit in between, and there are moments now and then when the brain begins to slow and the line begins to blur: a gust of wind on horseback, maybe, or a visit to a life whose due date has already been set. A moment, tiny or earth-shattering, when nothing will be the same again. A simple, brief pause between the end and the beginning of an existence. This, I feel, is one such moment.

5.
They say that the great fiction writers are the ones who can capture the world, the real world, so here I am.
I am sitting in a small room—small, mind you, by the superficial and unfair standards to which a room is normally held; but, considering the fact that this room is a dorm, and that I have not been cursed with the plague of a roommate, I’m willing to consider it spacious. There is a tall bed (extra long twin, they said it was) in one corner, upon which is spread my new plaid bedding. My family helped me to put on the sheets before they left, and so it is a miracle that the fabric is not sopping with tears. Next to the bed is a table comprised of two crates stacked upon one another, which I built with my own two hands, sort of. I suppose I should probably tell you that my mom brought the boxes home from the store with the idea that I attach them together to make a bedside stand, and it was at that point that I actually took on the project of attaching the two cases together with metal brackets and nailing on four short feet, which I cut out of a dowel. Long story short, it was not so much a woodworking project as an Ikea assembly where we had lost the directions; but potato potato, really. I personally don’t care about the distinction, but I don’t mean to mislead you. I’m no master woodcarver or anything.
I feel… empty. I want a better word, but there is none. I even looked it up in the dictionary to see if I could find a more proper way to say it, more sophisticated, communicative, but when I looked it up, I found four entries:
an empty house: VACANT
an empty threat: MEANINGLESS
without her, my life is empty: FUTILE
his eyes were empty: BLANK
and laughed because if you asked me how I felt, I would have told you that I felt 1. VACANT, 2. MEANINGLESS, 3. FUTILE, and 4. BLANK. Unlike cats, I love dictionaries, and dictionaries love me. We get each other.
I snuggle into my hard, cedar chair, and I want Boo Dog.
Boo Dog is a stuffed animal, thusly christened because he is a blue dog who was named by a small toddler with a total inability to pronounce certain consonants. He is a little chubby and plushy and he is fun to cuddle, like a fat friend, and his fur is a soft baby blue. He has yellow spots around his eyes, which are made of the same black thread as mouth, stitched over and over in the same two spots. In places it is coming out, and it hangs off in strings; the emergence of this unravelled thread is so constant it that it is simply impossible ever to get ahead of the problem, so it’s not worth the trouble of trimming the fringe. He’s cute, but the story behind him is even cuter.
So apparently, when I was a baby, I loved to sleep in shopping carts, at least that’s what Mom says. And one day, the two of us were in a big store. Big, at least, for me at the time. I was in my usual position, cradled in the little child seat at the rear of the shopping cart, relaxing with my hands crossed behind my head like a man with years upon years of experience with laziness (in that respect, I have always been decades ahead of the curve). The story goes that when my mom wasn’t looking, or when she had turned away from me to peer at some product label printed in a size six font, I saw Boo Dog hanging from one of the shelves and was evidently tall enough to reach him. By the time Mom made it back to the cart, I was already fast asleep with the stuffie in my arms.
She didn’t notice until she was at the register. The clerk must have pointed me out and asked if she wanted to buy the toy. She wanted to leave it at the store, considering I was already up to my tiny eyeballs in plush toys, but there I was, all asleep and snuggly in the basket at the top of the cart like some orphan in a Hollywood cliché, and cute as a button, I might add, should you permit me to editorialize. And to take the toy from me would be not only to steal a stuffed animal from a sleeping child, but also to wake me—five dollars seemed hardly a price to pay, I’m sure. So we bought him, or rather my mother did, and he has kept me company ever since. But I’m in highschool now. Boarding school. I really ought to grow up, right? That’s why he’s at home right now, seven hours away if I had a car, which I don’t.
And I don’t just miss him because he was always there (I smushed the spider in the far right corner of my bedroom that had “always” been there as soon as I was tall enough), although that must account for something. It’s that it feels wrong to be doing this without him—writing, I mean. He always did this with me, from when I was little; it started before I could write or even read. I would tell my stories to him. Later, in second grade, I was writing a story to enter into some kind of contest, and I did all of the typing on a school computer during class time. But whatever I put in the story, I ran by Boo Dog at home, first. Back then, his threads were still intact.
So from the beginning of what I remember, it’s always been the same with me and Boo. He listens—listened—patiently like a psychiatrist while I ranted on like a lunatic. When I was done with the brainstorming, he would often sit in my lap while I wrote, and sometimes he would cuddle with me when it got scary. We liked reading Stephen King books together, too.
Well anyway I’m here now and he isn’t, and that’s just how it is. He’s just a toy, anyway. My mom says that we’re the kind of people who just get too attached to objects, that’s why our house is so messy. I’m gonna miss my family.

6.
Today, as I was walking around school with a bag of books, I noticed something that caught me off-guard, and I ran short of breath. I dropped my nylon bag onto the blacktop, computer and all, and just stood there, feeling the pollen tickle my nostrils. The flag was at half mast.
I picked up my stuff and walked on thinking to myself, thinking how strange it all was. The smell of the stables poured over the hills, giving the otherwise sickly-sweet air a salty flavor, and a whinny echoed from behind the bush-spattered hilltops. There is a view of the whole valley, too, from the school, like we’re above it all. The truth is, though, we’re not. We’re just alone.
I wonder why the flag is low today, what could have happened that the nation was in mourning: and how I could not know about it. How many were dead today? My dad and I used to watch the news together, channel four, and Mom and I would always stay up late for Jon Stuart. But I haven’t been able to keep it up, since I’ve gone away.

7.
I’ve reread what I’ve written so far, and I talked a lot about Mom. I think it’s because she is on my mind the most of any of them. My parents are where I got my affinity (and knack, I hope) for writing: I got my dad’s vocabulary—we used to call him a walking dictionary, kind of like Encyclopedia Brown—and my mom’s long-windedness, which is beloved and sometimes almost as annoying as my constant interjections for grammar corrections during conversations, which, I believe, is not hereditary but my own. But my dad went here, back before it became a coed school, and so he has always known and understood this school. He gets the perks and pitfalls of boarding. Mom and I do too, of course, but not the way he does. So I think she worries about me, out here on my own. I worry about me too, of course, but I am me, so it seems common sense that I should. The thing is that Mom feels such inexpressible empathy for me that when I’m terrified, she is too, and when I’m exuberant, she is too, and so I worry about her. And so she worries about me.
I have a sister, too. She’s two years ahead of me, but not at this school. She goes to a school closer to where we live, a… regular school. That is, not a boarding school. She and I have a lot of inside jokes, mostly about our favorite TV show to watch together, The Office, and I’m gonna miss her. I think she’s going to miss me too, but she made no secret of how she felt about getting her own bathroom. As things go between siblings, we are not too bad. But she is another reason I feel like I’ve disappointed my mom. Because she stayed. She stayed, and I went off to board, like home wasn’t good enough or something. From the impressions I’ve gotten so far, most people here don’t feel to bad about leaving (teens and parents, it turns out, are not always quite so reconcilable), but I didn’t want to go away. I just… I really liked the school. And it came at a price.
Goodbye sucked. It was like a slow and painful death, only afterwards there was no sweet release, just loneliness. I remember when my mom finally acknowledged the elephant in the room—that nearly all the other parents had left, it seemed—and asked how I wanted to say goodbye. Should it be here, in my partially unpacked room? Or should we go to the front of the school? I had no idea, because I had never thought about how I wanted to say goodbye to them. I guess I was just in denial all summer long, until then, and I think that made it hurt even more that day; instead of landing gradually, I crashed right into the realization, and burned. I ended up walking with them all the way to the car. When we arrived at the parking lot, my mom said she didn’t want to leave me there: it wasn't a nice enough place. She wanted to leave me someplace pretty, someplace that would comfort her and make her know that I was off on an adventure and going somewhere, rather than just up and leaving. I was nearly certain, though, that she just wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Or maybe that she could tell I wasn’t.
Either way, we dragged our feet on the way up the short path back to the school, a pretty passage surrounded on all sides by pepper trees and avocado trees, and the occasional viridescent palm. This was a nice enough place for certain; it was part of the school grounds and it led its way back to my room, surrounded intermittently by faculty houses that were just barely visible through the trees. And so we said goodbye.
Three times we did so, I remember, each more terrible than the last. And then, each time, we would move further up the path, closer to my dorm, and I was acutely aware of the fact that these uncomfortable seconds were the last I would spend with the three people with whom I had spent my entire life for a long, long time. My mind, which was broken like a dusty 45 RPM, was telling me, “I don’t want to go, I don't want to go, I don't want…”
And I thought of home. I thought of those final moments there, how it had felt watching my bed, Boo Dog sitting hunched over limply on my pillow, simply slip farther and farther and farther away until I was too far down the stairs to see anything anymore. I remembered kicking a bean bag on the way out, and kicking it hard, because that is how I get when I’m under stress but I don’t have time to write. It had felt good, like I’d landed the blow right in the gut. I thought of our pool, and the tree house I’d built the past summer, and the trampoline that my parents bought for Miranda and me one Christmas. I thought of them without me.
Then, I said goodbye. I said it for the last time, crisply, plainly, lucidly. Agonizingly. I thought, “I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, I don't want…” and I wished my mom luck at the programming class she was sitting in on (she was thinking vaguely of resuming her career with the newly available time) and my sister luck with tennis and my dad luck at work. Mom did a good job of holding it together for me, holding in the tears, but as I walked away, we both looked back and by chance (?) caught each other’s eyes at the same moment, and even though the distance was far and my eyes were blurry I’m pretty sure we were both crying.
When they were around the corner, I was alone. I was alone in the whole place, and nothing else had ever felt so real. I walked slowly and calmly, and watched as the foliage flowed by, like a crying baby who has been shown their favorite toy, and quieted. Some other students—sophomores, I think—milled about on a lawn over to my right, chatting quietly in the heat of the Ojai Valley. I heard other sounds, too, the sound of clanging dishes from the dining hall, and the chirping of small birds from some of the loftier tree branches. There was a small cactus patch, and as I looked I could identify barrel cactus and aloe and prickly pear, but there were others, too, many others.
I didn’t know a lot of the other children. There is one boy, a family friend, who I knew—we went on a joint family trip together once during the summer after second grade to Ecuador. I think we zip lined over the Mindo Cloud Forest strapped together; there are pictures of it, and I remember bits and pieces. In recent years, though, contact with him has been scarce, if existent at all. We caravanned down to the school once for one of the steps in the admissions process, but that was really it. So I was little nervous. The social anxiety didn’t emerge until after my parents and sister left, but that was probably just the denial displaying its strange and calming effect on me, like morphine that I’ve run out of.

8.
My mother’s father was my first grandparent to die. It happened last fall. He died after his health had been declining for many months, and he was ready to go. He went in the night, holding hands with his first and only wife (I’m not claiming that a marriage is worth more one way or another, but it has to count for something). He was a man who started from a modest background and made an honest living, raising three kids in a happy family, and you have him to thank for reading this.
I don’t remember the day it happened. The exact day, I mean, just that it was in the fall. That’s all I need to know. What I do know is his birthday, and that works for me. I like to think of him on his birthday, not on the day he died. I hope someday someone will think of me the same way. Because I don’t care about mortality, really, if there’s someone left behind to think of me like that.

9.
I go to a boarding school where there are horses—to learn to ride, they say, is to learn the nature of life. The creatures are stabled on the outskirts of the school, to the northwest, so the wind blows the smell of the barns straight through my dorm, over the slanted roof of the dining hall and into the classrooms. The smell of horses is different there, too, sweeter, because it mixes with the pollen, sap and sweet cactus of the valley. The stalls are grouped in clusters of about twenty or so, each along the beginnings of the hillside. And, on the other side of a short ridge is the pasture, from which one cannot help observe the entire basin below, sitting in the clearing just as Robert Frost described it. Much like the morning the flag was brought to its knees, today was an eventful one, and it was on these hills that I was walking.
As I headed out to the pasture, I nuzzled my face into the collar of my favorite coat, which was covered with zippers and buttons so that I looked like I was in a punk rock band (my mom used to call it my “attitude jacket”). The coat was a generous and plush blue, and looked to me kind of like the ‘80s, and I wore it like a security blanket. My mom bought it for me as a Christmas gift after I picked it up in a store and nearly didn’t let it go, and I had grown close with it since I brought it to school. This morning—around ten thirty, I think it was—seemed to me to be the first time since I had gotten it that I had been cold with it on. Today was well underway, a clear-skies, verdant morning; and the sun was proudly posing above the mountaintops, not realizing how cold it was down here. When I passed into the shade, my shivering got worse, and when the trees subsided, so did the chills. It was like I was going crazy.
Two of my friends were there, too. One of them, the tall one with lighter hair, carried a black phone in his left hand, swinging it against against the air aimlessly. At this school, where the use of phones publicly is disallowed for the sake of the community on a whole, something as simple as this could be risky, but I could tell he didn’t care, and I didn’t either. Besides, we were going to use it to film for our project, so we had a perfectly viable excuse if it came down to it. The other boy who walked with us was shorter, and his hair was perfectly black. His eyebrows were strong and slightly raised, and he wore a dark red varsity jacket. He looked like what I thought going to a prep school would look like. But that was just a coincidence this morning: based on the raccoonlike purple surrounding his eyes, I could tell he didn’t spend a heap of time doing his hair and his outfit this morning.
The cracked hills of the school crunched underfoot as we passed by the small opening in the oaks, a secret passageway to the outdoor chapel, and I thought about the place beyond the opening in the greenery. Through the aperture, which I can just see now from my room, there is a path, steep with shale and seemingly insurmountable, that clambers toward the summit of the miniature hill with the zealousness of an Everest climber. Upon stepping beyond the wooded passageway, one emerges into a clearing and there is a sweeping view of the basin, like the ridge above the pasture. There are brown benches and a podium embossed with a gold cross standing in front of a short rock wall, and beyond that is a precipice. The ground falls far—and sharply—due to the nature of the prominence that sits perched on the wall of mountains surrounding the dale. Yes, all this perfection and the place is encircled with tall oaks and pepper trees whose oblong leaves tickle when they fall. And as I walked I thought about how, when I came to this place, I imagined I would go up there and write sometimes, and just watch, because the valley was so small that you could see each of the cars, and each of the farms, and each of the sun-beaten tractors as they made their rounds about their water-starved orange groves. And you could stand on the wall, wind with its fingers pulling ever so slightly, suggesting. But writing is not the only thing privacy and a sunset view are conducive to: it’s bad to go up there, because you don’t know what boy and what girl you’ll find misusing its freedom.
So we walked to the pasture. We crossed the baked earth and we passed the chapel and surmounted the ridge, and the pasture lay ahead. The view just hidden by the brittle undergrowth, we, being too lazy to use the gate, ducked the fence and walked among the horses as they ate and socialized and ignored us. About a hundred yards down the hill, a group of girls filmed their project, and the boy in the varsity jacket took off down the hill to greet them. The taller one and I continued to make our way to the summit. As we walked, the horses, like dreams, began greet us as gods, nuzzling us and following us up the hill. When we shooed them, they dispersed.
As we reached the top, though, still the view was obscured. The clay seemed to rise to meet the sky, rise to meet my eyes, telling me: the precipice is not here, not yet. It was then the tall boy called to me, and pointed to a horse that lay in the dust; at first, we thought she was asleep, or else basking in the sun. She was still. Then, of course, we thought she was dead, and we moved slowly in. Sensing the approach of predators, or else gods, the creature—which was apparently alive—suddenly broke into a burst of spastic motion, scrambling at the air with three of its legs, twisting its neck around to look its executioner in the eye, terrified. It beat its hooves and head on the ground like a tantrum, but soon it settled, accepting that its fate was to die. I did not feel it yet, but she did: we were the harbingers of death.
When the horse stopped moving, we could see why it was lying on the ground. Its left foreleg, which she did not dare move, was swollen and badly bloodied at the knee. Bent slightly, the leg looked dead on the ground, and we stared at it silently for a moment, each knowing what happens to horses with broken legs. Then, we made somber arrangements. He would retrieve the other boy and I would go find someone who knew how and when to shoot a horse.
Fortunately, there was a house just over the ridge where a man who I knew had that ability lived, and I went there and told him of the horse in the pasture. He came, and called another expert to be sure that nothing else could be done. When we showed him back to the creature, who looked at him with familiar eyes, and the man shooed us away. As we faced the West, I could finally see the valley.
We never heard a shot. In a school setting, I was later told, lethal injections are preferred; they help avoid traumatizing the children with the sound of death. And so for awhile, we walked back in silence. Then the boy in the varsity jacket spoke aloud. He said, “S***.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. But I didn’t agree. I didn’t feel like s***: I felt at peace. I thought of the animal above us lying on the ground with its head against a rock as they pet it and whispered, “shh.” And I thought of it looking out upon the valley with a mirthful smile, laughing, looking out upon the precipice and falling, not knowing where it would land as the needle pricked its neck. And I thought about how, for so many years, I had been wrong about God. Because that’s the beauty of it, that dying feeling. It’s a feeling of goodbye, and it hurts, but there’s also the precipice, the chapel, the Duomo, the wind and the rush and the not knowing.
It’s like this: life isn’t an uphill battle; it’s a mountain, it’s a goddamn mountain, and you’re at the top. So the only way down this mountain, or at least the one I know of, is to just jump over the edge; just take a leap of faith or hate or love or whatever you want, and you’ll land just fine, scraped up but fine at the edge of the next precipice. It sure isn’t elegant, and you’ll have to leave some things—a lot of things—behind, but the pasture lies ahead, it always does. And we and our dreams, like so many horses wandering in the pasture, free and simple, will one day die; and in so doing live within ourselves more than any person or thing has ever lived before.
This is my cliff, my incredible jump—the first of many. And I am not afraid.