A Mare Visit

My heartbeat and pulse were out of sync--fibrillation, I think it is called.  It was not organic, not a chronic malady passed down due to bad genes.  No, it was a combination of shock and anxiety, and of amazement and downright pure joy.  That’s my assessment, anyway, with all due apologies to those with advanced degrees able to make an objective diagnosis.  But for this narrative, I will apply my diagnosis, subjective though it be.  I shall not suspend you further: my heartbeat and pulse were at odds because, the other morning, I found a horse in my garage.

But I won't continue to relate my anatomical workings; that would be tantamount to beating a dead...no, I refuse to say it.  I will leave bad puns to beginning poets.  Suffice it to say that exposure to such a robust being, to a mare so powerful and so beautiful in one’s garage is enough to tingle the lumbar and make one’s Adam’s apple feel like a real apple.  Truly I say to you, I was upside down.  I had been somewhat shocked, not long ago, by deer in the dark on a late night walk in the neighborhood.  Yet that little animal encounter paled to this. 

I wanted to live a universe of excitement and revel among the enchantment.  I wanted to sunbathe in my own warm rays of joy.  All these wants were due to the fact that I love horses; I am an animal person to be sure, yet I do so love, and always will love, these magnificent equine creatures.  Yet, I could not help wanting to understand this logically.  That is the engineer in me, the rationalist, the black and white thinker.  In some ways, I am a puppet to my own analytical tourniquet, my penchant for assessing all situations as equations with finite resolution.  A is A--Aristotle and all that.

No matter.  This was a keystroke that transcended logic, an entry of life that circumvented laws of identity and all the combined wisdom of the ancient Greeks.  Because she was unassuming, my lovely mare, swishing her tail slightly, standing aside my gray Honda Accord.  She was strength with dignified gentleness, she was taking of basic inhalation, she was an empress of selection.  And she looked at me with such lovely black eyes, wherein the depth of the cosmos itself seemed to abide.  Here I am a mathematician and an engineer asserting I knew, at that very moment, that love was an unconstrained conduit between man and beast.  There was no formula, no equation, no objective test to measure its worth.  Not one dram of this bond--a bond that is love--could be constrained in a test tube; such is the volatility, such is the reactive verve.  It was sufficiently dynamic enough to stir the universe in me.

My heart calmed.  Yet it also cried in the way profound joy elicits tears.  I cared not of the why or the how.  I cared only of the what--that was enough for me.  I moved toward my mare and felt a stream of butterflies swirl in my chest.  I reached her, and heard her nicker*--she said hello.  I stroked her mane, rubbed her long face, and spoke softly, uttering few words, for words were not necessary.  I surveyed the scene, the incongruity of a mare in a garage filled with tools and snow shovels, barrels and grills--even a kayak and life preservers.  But I stopped myself dead in mid analysis. 

Because this was life, and this was love.  That’s what mattered.   


580 Words
Writer’s Cramp Winner
11-14-15

*nicker...to neigh softly.
________

Requirements:
--fibrillation
--horse
--garage
--puppet
--keystroke
--kayak