in praise of falling
I don’t know I have been arrogant until I am on the ground. I have slipped off the horse and discovered myself earthbound, in the blessed company of the flies that burst from the tall grass. The horse in question has stopped, as she has been taught to do, at the moment where she felt me slide off her back, and now looks down at me. I want to imagine she is asking, “What are you doing down there?” But the truth is, the animal looking down at me is also unfathomable to me. I don’t know what she is thinking.
I don’t know what I am thinking, either.
I get up with adrenaline in my fingertips and a bruise blooming on my elbow. I put my hand on her neck, feel her hair, feel the blood flowing in both of us. She and I walk back to the paddock. She looks for the dinner that has been dropped off. I walk back up the hill and through the motions of the things I know to do - putting things away, turning off lights, and get in my car to drive home.
I am fourteen on a soccer field trying out for Varsity. Me and two other friends have been on the JV team together and we all want to move up - varsity is where you play with the seniors, where you get better uniforms, more games, where parents stand on the sidelines and praise a goal or an assist. Varsity has inside jokes and orange slices, it has the athletic, popular girls who made the team as eighth graders last year.
I play my heart out. I lay it on the field like an offering - my body soaked in sweat and sunburned, the orange pinny from the scrimmage twisted around my torso. I am sure I have done what it takes. I am so, so sure.
At the second to last opportunity, when they’re naming - or was it not naming? - the people who made it, one of my friends joins their ranks. The other friend and I surrender our pinnies and join the JV team practicing on the other end of the field.
I vow I will never again attempt something I am not sure I can do perfectly.
I have clung to this vow for eighteen years. I have held it like a candle illuminating a room. Will I pursue theater? No, my talent isn’t robust enough. Will I study chemistry? I could, but look at what I can do even better - philosophy, literature, history. Will I go on a date with the arrogant boy in the student government who says he doesn’t like me? Yes, because I will win.
I have lived in this vow, loved according to it, made choices in my life by its light - for so long that it is a bit like breathing. Unnoticeable and essential. And then I fall off a horse and I look up at her, and she is unfathomable, and I realize what I thought I knew or thought I could do is in the ground with me.
And I break my vow.
I break it quietly walking her back to the paddock, and as I walk up the hill with my breath caught up in my throat, tears hot against my eyes but not falling. I break it in the silence of my car ride home thinking about what I now know I cannot yet do, but how I might still get back on. I break it as I write this now, telling you about it, a vow I’ve been keeping inside my ribcage where it presses me to do the safe and the perfectible and to wow with you my apparent ease - but not showing you the many loves I’ve had, the ghost ships in my heart that set sail without me, and though I love this vow, and the self who made it -
though I love her surrendering her heart on the field and her orange pinny to the coaches with a fierce determination to avoid them forever -
and all the lives she has lived, teeming with beauty, with great loves, with Aristotle and bookshops and Texas fields with the light just right -
I break my vow to the perfectible for the sake of that horse and her wide eyes. For the sake of the bruise to my ego and my assumptions and my elbow. I break it for the sake of a life of full of lovely, difficult things that I sometimes fail at and then keep loving. I break it for the sake of the three children who look at me, wide-eyed themselves, when they ask how it felt to fall off.
“It’s hard,” I said. “And it’s good.”