The sidewalks are voodoo-pinned with bare-branched trees, and as the lamps blink off upon my crossing the street to the corner deli to buy one black coffee and say good morning to my One True Love, my heart pounded with the strength to nail a house.
I’m sure this sounds all too dreamy and pedestrian to you, Yulia, notorious cynic and hater of happy and romantic things that you are, but a street down from the deli is a vintage store and before the vintage store is a sculpture of a horse with stilt legs, and typically I wouldn’t give something having to do with horses a second though—you probably knowing why, what with those elementary school bus boasts of ours, of the fibs that moving over here from Texas meant saying goodbye to our ranch full of farms and horses and horse-like business—our only true horse-business having petted one once at a petting zoo we both detested; and remember Maddy Thistle, that girl that was obsessed with horses and had plaque on her teeth and too much wax in her ears? Association destroyed the species for me, but this too is beside the point.
I bet you’re still distracted with the True Love business, but no, I will not disclose that person to you, not so much as a pronoun, because you’re a sneak and a snitch and a meddler. I say this with nothing but fondness, of course. So forget about it.
This jumping around business is all, I think, an unconscious effort to grate at you, Yulia, you and your rigid ho-hum of get to the point and don’t stray post or prior, though I think a tale deserves buildup, even if in this case that buildup is what I bet you’re thinking right now, your by God, when will she get to the point kind of thought, even if my own integrity as a natural storyteller is somewhat invalidated by this forced background blah blah just to spite you.
But, like I said, that’s beside the point.
The point is being I don’t like horses because they smell and are too big and impracticable for modern day city life (don’t I sound like you here, Yulia, in my substance over show, though you know I hate dogs and cats, too, probably because Mom always spent more time rubbing diaper rash cream into that ugly old dog’s chewed-away spots than spend time with us) but I saw this horse with its stilt legs and I thought, haha, that’s Yulia.
Not calling you a horse, that is, but I thought of you after thinking of the saying, Get off your high horse, and the like. The statue didn’t have a plaque (again, with the teeth) so I don’t know if the interpretive pun was intentional, but to each his own, and all that. The stilt-horse could just as well mean something mighty and strong like refusal to be saddled or ridden, and I got all squinty-eyed staring at that horse, thinking about it, but distracted because I couldn’t stop thinking of you. This runaround was to lead to this, my asking you if you remember how when I was eight, I think, my favorite thing to chant at you was to get off your high horse. I’m looking at this unnamed, unlabeled horse, thinking of that, thinking of you, and how I miss you.
Forgive the mushiness, Yulia, but this is where I started getting a little sad, or rather, empty, you know, lonely, because I thought of you, High Horse Yulia, and how long it’s been since we spoke, or saw one another, or, you know, acknowledged one another apart from some external middle-man force. Despite your gung-ho take charge attitude I know you can hold a grudge when you want to, so I decided to be the driving force this time. You know I’m a compulsive reader, like when I sit on the toilet I read the tampon box first in my head in English and Spanish and then out loud but hushed in French, matching words I didn’t recognize to the English above, like that. When I sat at the True Love’s deli waiting for my coffee I’d read the menu backwards and forwards, despite never ordering anything else, but just needing to read something, you know, and I’ve read it so much that I know the words covered up on some menus with grime and stickiness. I decided to keep a pen and notepad by me, to write something to you whenever I start itching to read (there’s a notepad by the toilet, one on my nightstand, one in my purse) and it’s been a few days since I’ve had those sitting out, waiting to be written in, but I didn’t really have a go until I saw that stupid stilt-horse, and now, well, here we are. Here I am, getting off my high horse.
I wanted to remind you that I miss you and in a few weeks I’ll call you, assuming by then you’ll have gotten this. I’m sticking this in priority mail because I don’t trust snail mail at all but, you know, just another romantic notion to irritate you. We can drive to downtown, though you’re paying for parking because remember last time you were here, I gave the quarters for the meter, even though you had a job and I didn’t. That really chapped my hide (hehe) as it were. I’ll take you to the deli and maybe point out that person to you. I’ll show you the stilt-horse.
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2015.