I had a really good run in my writing today and am back up to speed. This episode has been a lot of fun to write. I’m finding that it is really part two of the mid-season turning point. Some of the things that I thought would make it into that episode just weren’t ready to come out yet, but are presenting themselves in unexpectedly lovely ways. I’m feeling good about my writing at the moment and I’ll take that whenever I can get it.
On the other hand, the horse side of life is, not to put too fine a point on it, absolute shit. We’re still looking at what feel like hourly reports from the vet on the many and varied ways in which our horse is attempting to die. I hate this. I hate our lives. I hate having horses. They’re these great huge beasts, but if you so much as look at them funny, they roll over and die on you. And as the years have gone by, the horses we have are all ones that I have known closely. I mean, they are not ones that were born when I was very young and so don’t remember much about them. The one dying now is four goddamn years old. I was there when he was born. I named him. I helped break him. Everything that has happened in his life, I was around for. He’s one of my babies. Truth: he is not one of my favorites. He’s got personality problems, to say the least. He dislocated one of my mother’s ribs with his bad behavior. Bet you didn’t know you could dislocate ribs.
But with all the things he’s done wrong, with all the complaints and criticism that I have, I still think of him as mine. It still breaks my heart. And I am so, so tired of loving animals with everything I’ve got and having them die. It’s one thing when you expect an animal to only live a few years, when you know the time you have together will be short. But when I imagine that I could get twenty, hell, sometimes thirty years with a horse and instead I get nine or six or four… I’m sick to death of it. There’s a reason I don’t date casually. It’s all or nothing for me. But I feel like there’s a limit to how often I can give all and have it fall apart on me. I think I have a quota of heartbreak, after which I just don’t want to give a damn any more.