Rush of my Heart

The horses are wearing blankets.

The sky is the kind of candy-sprinkle blue that you usually only see on photoshopped pictures, and orange trees fire up streets everywhere you go. Most of the corn from the fields has been cut, and the birds swoop down and pick up the dregs of the crop at breakneck speed – narrowly missing my car and their own deaths each day. I try to get them to hear me through my windshield with my warnings, “Be careful! Be careful!” Each day they prove how they’ve ignored me.
28 degrees of a crisp Fall dawn greeted me as I took my dog outside just the other morning, horrifying my floppy, sleep-warmed body. Since then, I’ve kept an old pair of mom’s slippers by the bed.
The season has officially changed.

I’m alive. I’m breathing. I can feel my heart beating against my ribs. I go to sleep and I wake up. Each day.
Somehow, my body seems to stay in a constant state of agitation, a constant feeling, even when I’ve forgotten, that something is wrong. Something is off. Have you ever been in an accident? Surprised yourself with a fall, a crash, an event that left you in a momentary state of panic, as if you had just done some kind of serious damage to yourself, and you only needed a minute to figure out what that something was? That’s what it’s like. I feel the unease and I take inventory, checking my body for the wound. While I’m driving, while I’m teaching, the moment I wake up – before I fall asleep. It’s constantly sneaking up on me with a jolt of fear that something is broken, and I need to find it.

I fear I spend too much time alone with my head, so when an invitation was extended to me on Sunday to get out of it, I took it.

Part of the youth group from church took me in the late afternoon to the bay that apparently resides in the town directly next to mine, the road leading to it hidden down lanes of wide beautiful crops and fields of cows. It surprised me by springing up from just behind the forest line, and I grabbed my coat and camera from the trunk of the car as I followed the laughing people down the dock in the swiftly fading sunlight. The girls skipped and hung to each other, wrapped together in a single rough blanket like a roll of woolly tape. The boys ran after them, jumping on each others’ backs, stealing hats, racing to the wooden posts far out over the water. I hung behind, pulling my camera from my bag and lifting the collar of my coat to cover my bare neck, suddenly remembering why I don’t like ponytails.

I clicked away with my camera as I advanced down the dock, watching the fishermen pack up their things and start walking towards land as I made my way further out over the sea. The seagulls greedily weaved back and forth after them, catching the scent of fish on their hands, their coats, their buckets.

We stopped at the edge of the dock, and one by one we set our feet on the first rung of the wood and lifted ourselves up to peer into the waters reflecting the brilliant sunset. For a single moment, the air remained quiet as we all looked out into the sky. How can a beauty so perfectly lovely have the ability to break your heart?
A laugh rang out into the night, and the moment was over.

“Pictures!” I heard repeated again and again. “Pictures!”
We set up the camera with the timer, and the girls took turns running back and forth to see their handiwork.
I began to relax, and tried to laugh in time with the others, to let go of the voices in my head and focus on the real ones around me. We stayed at the end of the pier until the sun was gone, and an old man made his way towards us, saying it was time to go. Everyone started to head back the way we’d come.

The view held my eyes as I walked towards the shoreline, and a campfire suddenly lit the sky. The moon peeped over the trees. Ahead of me, the girl left holding the blanket reached up and pulled her boyfriend beneath it’s shelter, snuggling into the crook of his arm as he matched his steps to hers. I watched their backs.
Suddenly, I felt fingers lace with mine.
“Is this ok?” the youngest girl of the group asked.
I hadn’t felt such a simple gesture of friendship in a long time, and I smiled back at her. Suddenly, our arms were swinging as we hurried after the boys.

Back in the car, the radio flickered to life. My heart sank at the familiar tune.
“What radio stations do you like?” the driver asked me.
I was quiet a moment, trying to think of a way to avoid telling them that I didn’t like any stations with songs that I was familiar with right now, and was unwaveringly careful these days about the cd’s I listened to in my own car. Music has always held too much power over my mind and heart, influencing my thoughts, bringing memories, and now – hurting. The radio is too unpredictable, leaving my heart up in the air each time one song finishes, waiting for the next to begin. I hated just about everything I recognized.

Finally, I answered something that got my thoughts across. The car became quiet, and I wished I’d just held my tongue. The driver’s hand reached for the dashboard, and suddenly the popular song died and a loud trumpet blaring mariachi band took it’s place. The car filled to bursting with sound as his fingers turned the dial further and further to the right, and then the windows of the front seat were all the way down, releasing the music into the night and blasting the backseat with frosty air. His eyes met mine in the review mirror to search for a reaction. His passenger swung her head around to look.
I found myself to be totally unaffected by the Spanish lyrics and the bold brassy sounds, and soon, an uncontrollable urge to giggle took hold of me. Once mine broke free, the tones of everyone’s laughter clashed horribly with the crescendo.

8 months into living in this new place, I’m still becoming familiar with the new people. There are many reasons why hanging out might not be expected, or easy. I am older than them all. I don’t know them well. I don’t attend their schools, see them during the week, I’m from the city and they were born and raised in the heart of Oso. I’m the girl with a strange infatuation with flip flop shoes no matter what the weather is like, the only one of them without a jeep or truck, the one who hasn’t driven in snow and can’t identify birds by the way they sound. The only one who has experienced the strange concept of legitimate “neighbors”. I’m the one they offer to the animals in the woods as bait, the one who has never tasted the benefits of the family’s hunting. And yet, and yet.
We can appreciate a great bad song together and watch a cold sunset in silence as my heart defiantly keeps beating.
Does that count for something?