Running On

Quiet, nothing but the easy silence of a small town after dark, a road, a connecting road between two bigger ones, with one streetlight fifty feet from my front door but the opposite direction from my best friend’s house, so that when we walked home together during the ten years of our childhood it was in darkness, or rather walked halfway because we were kitty-corner to each other, and we’d walk to the corner, both us from whatever direction, her house or mine, slow in the star or moonlight because after all we were six and eight, little girls sent out picking raspberries when we met, right at this corner where we will part, twenty-one and nineteen, each of us running flat-footed back to our houses without a glance back, the first time we’ve been apart since the morning, Friday in the summer, up and moving at almost the same moment, woken by the heat and buzzing of cicadas, one of us picking up the phone and saying, The horse show’s tomorrow, come amuse Rory (or Gunner, or BT, depending on the season and who made the call) while I give him a bath, we’ll order pizza and go swimming later to wash off the dirt and the sweat, and when the night starts to come we’ll bring home our saddles and bridles, spread out an old stained blanket on the basement carpet and watch a movie while we saddle-soap and neat’s-foot-oil the brown leather worn from use, and we’ll talk about boys or girls or horses, or college, or all the nights and days we’ve spent together, eat popcorn with hands that smell of horse and chlorine and soap and oil, and then later, in the easy silence of a small town after dark, we’ll walk each other home, like always.

Body Language

I have always thought it animal motion, with my chin tilted down and my ears feeling pricked forward, looking over my glasses, a movement I call ears-up, and I pair it with rocking onto my toes, squaring shoulders that are already broad, making myself bigger like a dominant dog, or else I lift my head, lower my eyelids and flare my nostrils, my whole body canted backwards, and this I call my ears-back, a motion that in my mind is horselike, paired with a cocked hip, a rested foot, unconscious mimicking of the animal I have spent thirteen years in close contact with, so close that I shake my head and snort, stamp my foot, look up at people through a forelock falling over a pony’s eyes and I still think of my movements in a horse-ish way, when I climb hills I set my shoulders against an imaginary harness and tug and strain, a shire hauling a heavy load, so that each step is a triumph against the incline, and it doesn’t matter that the hill is barely a slope, for I am tall and brown and strong-legged, feather-footed, my tail docked and my muscles working in my sloped shoulders, a long mane brushing the left side of my arched neck, and when I reach the top I pause to give my coat a shake and look down proudly, horselike, and sometimes that’s all that gets me up a hill, pretending four long legs.

Music Major

Dancing is like flying, or breathing, something you do for the sheer glory or because you cannot help but do it, the music underneath you, like the air your wings cup or your lungs take in, and sometimes you are breathing not air but notes, whole glorious intoxicating bars and phrases and stanzas of notes, thicker but sweeter than oxygen, and along with the notes is sweat and the laughter that startles out of people when a spin is so quick and neat and beautiful that there is nothing to do but cry out, and whether the cry is a laugh or tears is all dependent on the music which holds you, and on the taste of the air coming in through the windows of the Scout House, whether it’s winter or summer, whether there is only a day before you leave them again for another year at school or if this is only the start of weeks of nights barely less hot than the days they follow, so that the warm thermals are there to lift you up, fill you with a joy so deep and hard it leaves you breathless, the good kind of oxygen-deprived, your feet barely touching the sprung wood floor, the pain that comes from dancing every night you can all but gone, spinning like a dervish or a hawk in wild flight.