She is sleeping.
Dreaming, even.
Her body is a black canvas decorated with intensifying red cuts and infectious wounds. Her skin is tainted with bruises and missing hair. Her legs are aching and her stomach twirling. She is suffocating from a thick layer of smoke and her eyes are watering from the haze of intoxicating chemicals.
Waking up never felt so relieving.
She is lathered from head to toe in a thick white sweat. Her body aches from what she can only explain as “nightmare” effects. Have you ever dreamt something so terrifyingly realistic that it is almost like it really happened?
She rocks herself up, slow and steady always won the race. It begins by an outstretch with her front legs, a heavy sigh and then an exhausting effort to lift herself from the dewy surface. Her hind legs follow and eventually she is on all fours, shimmying stray blades from her coat and stretching her neck out like an awkward giraffe.
It has been the second time in a row she has found herself asleep in the comfort of head dear Meadow.
But you have the Deserts as a home.
Ah, it is true. But she doesn’t feel home. She feels empty there, as empty as anywhere she has been before. She wakes in the scorching sun, bathes in the cold lake as her ebony body soaks up the afternoon heat wave, and then by the time the moon rolls around she is exhausted by the temperature and sleeps yet again. Until that feels like home, she will persistently hang in the meadow.
Or, until the meadow begins to feel strange and unfamiliar.
She has always been guilty of hiding in her comfort zone. Unwilling to try new things or make new habits.
Our little ebony mare doesn’t have any true memories that haunt her. She doesn’t have skeletons in her closet or regrets hung on coat hangers. Her biggest fault—unfortunately, I know—is her naivety. She is a blank slate, a white canvas. She has no devil, nor an angel to guide her off past mistakes and misfortunes. She doesn’t have the ghost of history haunting her from poor decisions. She is young, freshly a woman, and yet so many have already lived such plentiful lives in comparison to herself. She is but a child in an adult body.
And believe me, she is most definitely a beautiful adult.
And her blank slate, her white canvas is what the Meadow holds hostage. The Meadow knows she won’t fit in her kingdom quite yet, until she adds a few cuts and bruises a few limbs she won’t relate to the broken souls of the field. She cannot recruit, being so imperfectly perfect and infuriatingly polite. And she cannot bore anymore equines with her less-than-tolerable pitch.
The Deserts is good, it can give you a home…,
How can she voice herself so passionately when even she feels at odds with her residency.
She feels claustrophobic in the air of the field, and this is yet another reason to mark the Meadow as her desirable nest. Save herself from embarrassment and struggles. Make life a little easier, and hide away the slow to mature.
It is a fresh morning. She is wading herself in the water and soaking away her anxiety when the rustle of parting grass flickers her hazel eyes to alert.
Hesitantly, really, she walks herself from the lake with beads of water easing down her sculpted frame. Her ears twist like radar dishes hunting for sign and sound when a gold painted coat awaits her arrival.
He doesn’t truly await for her, but she can pretend he does.
Part of her yearns to run, fully outstretched and petrified. Another part of her wants to play around more with bravery and boldness, part of her wants to attempt to socialize.
The last man had been Tarnished, and while that conversation had seemed to run smoothly, she also had never seen him again.
Despite her inner contemplation, her body finds itself cautiously walking up to his side. She is elegant in how she presents herself, always had been and always will be. Her demeanor isn’t to be abrupt and sudden, it is to be careful and graceful. She wasn’t ever the warrior, but always the peacekeeper.
Her soft tune as she quietly greets, “hello,” is enough to prove that comparison.
“Exemplary,” she adds as if almost forgetting her name. Horses, horses are hard to talk to.
Stallions, though? Stallions are even harder.
Exemplary
I will be yours, and only yours, until the day I fade to black