It didn't really matter that I wanted to ride more than anything in the world. What mattered was the fact that I couldn't seem to just make myself do it.
I practically grew up on the back of a horse. From when I was seven to when I was seventeen, weekly lessons, once a week, every week, weather permitting, I got on top of a thousand pound animal and rode around a small dirt ring lined with a wooden fence. I loved it more than anything, except maybe reading and chocolate. The quiet snort of a trotting horse, the rhythmic pulse of a canter, the sweat and leather musk after we'd been out in the hot summer sun. Crunching through the snow in deep winter felt like moonwalking to me, like bouncing on air bubbles.
I was good at it, too. For four years I rode the trickiest horses, got on stallions that no one else would touch, and got bucked off more times than I'd care to admit. The adrenaline rush was a drug to me; I lived on it. Finally feeling an unruly mare relax and match her will with mine was something that I haven't been able to replicate anywhere else. I had a dream to become a trainer. And then, when I was fourteen, everything changed.
It was a soft spring day. The ground was spongy and there was the hint of thawing ice in the air. I swung up onto a filly called Hanna, whose father I'd successfully trained the year before. "Now, she's really responsive," my trainer said. "Go easy on her." I nodded and walked her off, working her up to a trot a few minutes later. "She's fast," I called to my trainer as we covered the ground more quickly than I was used to. A tickle of something invaded my belly, prickly like a feather, but I was too busy reining her in to think about it. A couple of more turns around the ring later, I noticed the big yellow school bus pulling up to the housing complex behind the barn. Squeal! Squeak! Screeeech! For a second I was distracted by the sound of the bus' brakes, and in that moment, Hanna decided that the bus wanted to kill her.
We were off. Like a shot, we were covering ground at a desperate gallop. I pulled on the reins, called to her, tugged some more. Nothing doing. My body felt frozen. "Pull her into the center!" my trainer called. "Circle her!" Slowly it hit me what she wanted me to do. What if she bucks me off? I thought. Or what if I fall off? God, the ground's gonna be hard. That's *really* going to hurt. But she wasn't slowing down. I mustered up my strength and yanked her, hard, into the center of the ring, circling her until she finally stopped. I got off, shaking, my jaw aching from clenching it, eyes huge as dinner plates. "That was the only time I've seen fear in your eyes," my mother said later.
I kept riding after that. But the loss of control haunted me. I never trusted horses again after that, not really. I started all over, riding horses I'd started out riding eight years before, mastering the basics while never truly letting go of the panic that filled my head whenever I felt a horse spook underneath me, or snort, or do anything that I hadn't expected. It was like static; I couldn't think. Suddenly I'd be in the fetal position on horseback, crouched over my horse's neck, holding on for dear life. Why did I keep doing it?
I kept doing it because even though I hated it, I loved it still. "Shit or get off the pot," my mom told me once in the car, two years later, after I'd freaked out and been bucked off by a stubborn pony I'd trained three years before. "You don't even try anymore. I don't know why I'm paying all this money just to see you fail." And in my junior year of high school, I finally quit, thinking that time would take away my fear. It hasn't, not really. Whenever I'm on horseback now, I can't relax or let go without visions of my body hitting the cold, hard ground. And yet I keep my hope alive, waiting for the day when my will to keep riding overrides my fear, waiting for the day when it will become more than just an empty gesture.