Horses

LINDA COLEMAN

 

Voices taunt me. I think of them sometimes like a big rowdy biker party in my mind—loud and tough, revving their motors without mufflers, spinning around in threatening circles.

God, not that shirt they say as I dress for breakfast. Not that one either. Wear your hair back …yeah, like that … No! Wear it down—more free looking … Don’t bring that book to the cafeteria—Jesus, so pretentious! Fuck it … who cares? Bring it! But don’t bring your camera too … who do you think you are anyway?

They rant and hound me all day, even in sleep. By now, by my third year in college, I thought I’d be done with all that.

Every day, no matter what the bikers say, I wear the heavy gray wool serape from Guatemala, and the black leather low-cut men’s boots I bought in town. The serape falls like long soft wings around me and hides my body, while the boots give me a substance and weight I don’t often feel without them. Together they ready me to encounter the others, any one of them. The others are the ones with conviction and focus. The ones that walk with intent, work with purpose, do not see the future as a dark abyss. They throw on clothes with a cursory glance, know just what to choose from the cafeteria line, and check off courses to take each semester with clear-visioned certainty. Choices delight them.

I hover around these people like a stray cat, looking to them for some kind of love or sustenance or both. In my housing unit alone, everyone but me has a passion for some eclectic study. There is Tom who studies microscopic plant survival on the tundra. Debbie, who travels to and from Mexico detailing Mayan marriage rituals, typing for long hours into the night. Jamie suspects there is a new species of coyote in the Berkshire Mountains that surround us. He spends his days in the woods like an old scout, brushing leaves gently off tracks and collecting scat in little plastic sandwich bags that lie in piles around our living room. And day and night, night and day, Brian practices John Fahey songs on his slide guitar in the room next to mine: slow, carefully plucked notes that hang in the air. I listen through the thin wall that separates us while I lie on my bed, watching smoke from my cigarette curl and fade into a thin haze above my tensor lamp.

 

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