The emotional threat looms over the sunset almost as visibly as the heavily pregnant rain clouds, ready to keep its promise at any moment. I feel it with such realness that I could reach out and touch it, but there’s no need; it’s besieging me without any invitation. In fact, it has already notified the pit of my stomach and the rash and reckless portion of my brain that the world I know is on the brink of smithereens and skeletal remains...a feeling I never wanted to meet face to face again. My nerves twinge, fighting the oncoming searing sensation; bracing for the physical torrent, the pure manic abandon - but with rough success.
In my mind I’m underwater, pressed downward and downward, while I exert half an effort to swim to the surface, or at least upstream; devoid of desire to care whether I land spiked against a knifelike jumble of rocks, slapped there by a relentless and unfeeling current and left crumpled into lifeless seagull bait. Air is no longer a necessity; the weight on my chest won’t allow its intake.
A dreamlike state is the only way to continue functioning. I begin to imagine this morphing into a Disney screenplay - ‘the young girl, numb and broken, leaps aboard her mount in a blazing burst of emotion, and away they tear at a gallop into the swollen clouds and lightning as raindrops begin to batter her already tear-stained face (intense orchestra soundtrack)...’
And yet, somehow I’m still standing here, and moreover slogging through mud with bridle in hand, coaxing said mount to trust my hand to slide the headstall over her sensitive ear, which calls for more patience than I am able to conjure. Eventually aboard, I have higher hopes of a rocket-like escape, but her tender feet barely carry a trot... so we walk, and I cry harder.