This song is half about a horse and half about a girl, and I still miss the horse.
–Townes Van Zandt 

Down a steep gravel road, in a small town in central Iowa, stood a red aluminum barn with three dutch door stalls that faced the gravel parking lot and opened to a muddy paddock. The barn was set back behind three outdoor pastures, all of which were covered by struggling grass and pocked with gopher holes. To the right of the barn was a manure pile thirty feet high. 

Every birthday I asked for a horse and every Christmas I asked for a horse, and every time my mother promised me it would never happen, until one Saturday, out of nowhere, she told me to get in the car. We drove a half an hour into the country, past megachurches, truck stops, beige housing developments and newly renovated Paneras, to a barn at the bottom of a gravel hill. A cowboy got out of the cab of his Ford F-150, which hauled a horse trailer the size of a semi-truck. He shook our hands and unbolted the trailer gate. I was overcome. I cradled my head in my hands and sobbed. “There you go, you got the horse,” my mother said, and hugged me like we always hug one another, so tight it hurts. 

When the cowboy re-emerged from the trailer he was leading a small, skittish horse down the metal ramp. She stood still for a moment and looked at me like a mean girl at a party. Immediately she tried to bolt, pulling against his firm hand, wheeling her large ass from side to side, trying to knock him off his balance, stomping at the gravel in protest when she did not succeed. “She’s a little wound up right now. I’d let her run some of her energy out,” the cowboy said, as he handed me her lead rope. 

*

Shirley straddled the line between small horse and large pony. She was average looking: sorrel with a white blaze, two white socks on her back feet, and a small scar on her left buttock. I was unattractive: chubby with stringy brown hair and a coffee-colored birthmark on my plush, pale cheeks. I had bad hygiene, horrible smelling feet from not wearing socks and sweating in my leather boots, never wore deodorant, rarely washed my hair. I dressed like a sloppy boy in too-tight Wranglers, my stomach billowing over, an oversized brown Carhartt shirt, with an XXL blue checkered button up to cover any possible curves that might show. 

I met Kate my third day at the barn. She looked me over much like Shirley had the first time she saw me: largely unimpressed. She had a confidence that some of the barn patrons found prickly and obnoxious on a thirteen year old girl, but our friendship was immediate, forged by proximity and my eagerness to make her love me. Kate was two years older than me, but our horses were the same age, though they could not be more different in temperament. While Shirley was what people had come to call “high-spirited,” Delbert was a large, clumsy bay Quarter horse, dependable, oafish and unremarkable. Kate asked me questions about Shirley, many of which I could not answer. I knew she was only three, that she was discounted from a farm in Pennsylvania. That my mother had found her by googling “cheap horse for sale,” chose the first horse she found, and bought her. 

I began to spend every minute at the barn with Shirley. I was almost always the first to arrive at the stables. My father dropped me off before going to work at the post office, and didn’t pick me up sometimes ‘til 9:00 p.m. A barn at daybreak is eerily quiet, a shallow rustling of limbs, hooves against the lime foundation, birds fucking in the rafters, slow knickers, horses gently grinding their teeth on wooden beams, the echo of boots on concrete slab. I flipped each switch and waited for the track lighting to pop and illuminate the barn one alleyway at a time, then turned the radios to KHAWK 98.1, The Heartland’s Country Station. 

Shirley did not yet love me in return. While Kate did everything with an insolent certitude, I remained timid around Shirley for months. I behaved as one does with their first love, trying to anticipate her movements and questioning my own abilities at every turn. My body was tense around her, white knuckles around her lead line and searing blisters on my palms from when she’d bolted, pulling the nylon rope through my hands. Shirley was adversarial, she moved as though she were always testing me. When I tried to catch her in the pasture she’d turn her ass towards me or run. Even when I sat with her for hours in the grass she treated me with bratty indifference, as though she felt spurned to have been placed with such a feeble companion.

For several days, all I felt comfortable doing with Shirley was leading her in from the pasture, grooming her, and returning her to the pasture to graze. Instead of trying to ride her, I spent my time decorating her stall door with a collage of horses cut from my old calendars and writing her name on her halter with glitter fabric paint. 

After a week, Kate was impatient with me, asking why I hadn’t ridden her yet. Was I scared or something? That she already felt comfortable chiding me was thrilling—to me, it signaled closeness. Kate favored severe horsemanship and looked down on my softer, more circumspect approach. On the seventh day, Kate threw her saddle over Shirley’s back while she kicked at the wall of her stall. Then she led her into the arena and ordered me to mount her. I raised one foot into the stirrup as Shirley blew fierce air from her flared nostrils, dancing in place like a bull in a chute. I hadn’t even swung my leg over the saddle before I was airborne. As soon as I hit the ground I stood up, too embarrassed to cry in front of Kate, wiped the wet sand from my jeans and spit the acrid taste from my mouth. Shirley ran wildly through the barn’s alleyways, empty stirrups beating at her sides.

*

If Shirley was my first love, Kate was my second. Kate didn’t need me like I needed her, which was precisely what made her so irresistible to me. For one, she wasn’t gay. She wore slutty, hot energy around her like a cloak. She was brassy with large unruly hair and a slight gap between her front teeth. Her Wranglers were too tight, but only on her ass. She’d sometimes split her denim right down the crack when climbing a fence, dismounting Delbert, or jumping off a tractor. I’d never had a best friend before, which made my sapphic obsession with her all the more powerful and confusing. We spent each afternoon together, and each weekend from sun-up to sundown. When I wasn’t with Kate I was thinking about Kate. 

Shirley’s obstinance was the project that bonded Kate and me. Each day we’d saddle Shirley and lead her to the same spot in the center of the arena. I’d put my weight in the stirrup, and Shirley would charge wildly. Sometimes I was able to mount her, but within seconds she’d begin bucking and I’d be thrown into the wall, over the fence, or onto the ground and left to pull myself up, knees wet with mud or frayed from bits of gravel. 

Shirley would run, as fast and as long as it took to work the intensity from her body. Later, I’d find her in the feed room eating from an open bin of grain, at the furthest, most verdant edge of the pasture, or simply waiting by her stall door, leather reins hanging to the ground, split in two where she’d trampled them. 

We went on like this for months. I walked with a constant limp. My body was riddled with large bruises, and my left kneecap was floating loose after Shirley slammed me into a gate. Kate grew more impatient with both of us. She was convinced Shirley’s disrespect for me was a response to the weakness I exuded. The final act of our horse training came at the end of the summer. Kate demanded to ride Shirley, and I submitted. I felt certain Kate was more capable than I was. She was certainly more brazen. We saddled Shirley, walked her around the arena a few times to ease her growing tension, then Kate climbed into the saddle. 

She had hardly steadied herself in the seat before Shirley vaulted into the air. To watch it from the ground was oddly more terrifying than to try and ride through it. Shirley bucked violently, her legs splayed oddly in mid-air as though she was falling through time, her eyes bulging, every sinew and vein suddenly visible. As soon as she met the ground again she reared up, her hind legs on the ground, her front legs in the air. Kate screamed as she fell. She pulled hard on the left rein, throwing Shirley off balance. They were falling together, Shirley straight onto her back and Kate, miraculously, to the left of her, and not underneath. 

Shirley rocked her 1,200 pounds between the horn and cantle of the saddle like a pendulum, helpless as a baby. The terror in her eyes was so enormous I could never have mistaken it for meanness again. I heard a hard thwack like a basketball on a blacktop: the heavy metal stirrup had fallen onto Kate’s ankle. Finally, Shirley rocked herself onto her side and heaved her body up from the ground. This time she did not run, but stood stunned over Kate, who moaned on the ground. 

Kate’s arm around my shoulder, I pulled her to her feet and she hobbled to the tack room. Her leg was swollen as a tree stump and inhumanly blue. I iced her ankle with the Lean Cuisine I’d brought for lunch. When the barn owner came to do chores for the day, she saw Kate’s injury and immediately called her mom. She yelled at us, told Kate how lucky she was to be alive, told me how lucky I was that Shirley had not broken her legs or back. Then she forbade anyone from riding Shirley on her property again.

When Kate’s mom arrived to drive her to the hospital she seemed proud of her daughter, who had not shed a single tear. 

*

Kate came back the next day with a cast on her broken ankle. It didn’t keep her from riding Delbert. With Shirley now off-limits, I’d sit in the grass and watch Kate ride slow, safe circles around me. When she felt bad for me, she’d let me ride Delbert, or sometimes we’d ride tandem, my arms around her stomach, the both of us bareback.

No one understood why I didn’t sell Shirley and buy a broke horse. To everyone else, she was useless and dangerous. My parents grumbled about paying for her. Other barn patrons brought in fliers advertising sturdy, aged horses I could actually ride. They offered to let me ride theirs. They recommended equine experts and tough love cowboy trainers—a few of whom tried and failed to break Shirley. 

*

I loved her, though. Before Shirley, I was home alone each day after school and every weekend. I spent my time binge eating, setting small scraps of paper on fire in the bathroom sink, talking to strangers on AOL Instant Messenger, or luxuriating for hours in a scalding hot bath. Now, I spent all my time at the barn. My parents could barely afford Shirley, but she doubled as a babysitter, my friend, and a guarantee that I wasn’t spending my weekends alone finding trouble like my brother, who at 18 was beginning his career of jail and psych ward stays.

After the accident, I gave Shirley all of myself. Instead of riding her, I went to the farm store and bought her colorful plastic combs and peppermint horse treats. When Kate and Delbert went on trail rides or barrel raced, I laid in fields next to Shirley while she grazed. I braided her hair like she was off to a dance team competition. I could accept that I might never be able to ride her, but I also felt certain she’d come to trust me fully, and when she did, I’d be able to ride her anywhere I wanted. It was my greatest show of patience to date, born of unbridled love.

*

Kate and I could not go riding together, but my friendship with her deepened and intensified over the next few years. Denied the opportunity to break Shirley, Kate began trying to break me. She enjoyed a few forms of light torture, and a part of me did too. When our horses were out to pasture she made me her horse, amused at all the things she could force me to do. Sometimes she’d tie me to a post and whip me with a riding crop. Other times she’d make me kneel on all fours and ride me up a steep hill. One day she tied me to the horn of her saddle and dragged me through the pasture, only stopping at the fence line, ignoring my sobbing, my mouth full of gravel, road rash streaking the length of my body. 

Most painful, though, was when she talked about boys, which she did constantly. She loved them all: the farrier’s son, a football player at school, a little punk at the roller rink, a cowboy she met at the local rodeo, a neighborhood shithead. I knew Kate could never love me as a girl. I didn’t think most girls could, but I always knew it would be especially impossible for Kate. Even still, I accompanied her on most of her little dates, and began to imagine I was a boy too. Her boy that she loved. In the chambers of my mind, I birthed and bloomed an entire male persona, Matt, the horse trainer and stable hand, son of a cowboy, the kind of boy that would tilt his baseball cap up and to the side so he could kiss Kate with ease—on a tractor, on a horse, or sprawled across freshly baled hay. 

Kate did love me, though, in her way. Or at least, I have to believe this. I get to believe this. We ate hot ham and cheese Hot Pockets together on the tack room couch. I spent most weekend nights at her house, laying next to her in bed, awoken by or drifting off to the sounds of her alcoholic mother crying or screaming at, or about, her boyfriend, a local cop and notorious philanderer. Kate was the first person I met who didn’t call her mother “mom.” She called her “Midge.” Her father killed himself when she was only a few years old, with a gun in their garage. Despite the barn as refuge for us both, Kate lived inside a heaviness I couldn’t comprehend. Because of this, I agreed to let her do whatever she wanted to me, loving her through every brutal game. 

*

Slowly, very slowly, Shirley began to love me too. She began to recognize my father’s car and ran alongside us as we drove down the driveway. She walked happily to greet me in the pasture, nickering when she heard my gait on concrete. While Kate rode Delbert, I taught Shirley tricks. She bowed, lowering herself on her front knees. If I held out my hand and commanded her to “shake,” she’d lift her left leg towards me and I’d grab her bended knee. She even hugged. I stood at her shoulder and she’d wrap her neck around me in a firm embrace, reaching until her muzzle rested on my shoulder. I no longer led her with a rope. Instead, she followed me around the barn like a lap dog. We did barn chores together. I’d fill water buckets as she ambled behind me dutifully. When I rode other people’s horses, she’d stand at the fence line and glare like a jealous lover. But it would still be almost two years until I was able to ride her. 

*

One weekend, while Kate was away on a trail ride, I laid in the grass reading an issue of American Paint Horse Quarterly while Shirley grazed next to me. We’d been like this for hours, the summer heat softening into fall. Suddenly she stopped grazing and walked so close to me her hoof touched my elbow. I held the magazine in front of my face to block out the sun. Wanting a little attention, she bent her neck down to chew on the corner of the paper, then began to nuzzle my face before grazing on a chunk of my hair. This was the primary show of her affection for me, chewing softly on my ponytail or the loose strands at my neck. I laughed and we stared into one another’s eyes. Like a magnet flipping onto its opposite, we’d linked in this new way. I stood up and walked to the fence. She followed behind. 

In one swift motion, I climbed the wooden rungs and threw my leg over her back, no saddle, no reins, no helmet, my body part horse, her body suddenly and inexplicably at ease. We sank into one another’s breath, felt one another’s imperceptible movements, and pressed against one another’s fears without resistance. I leaned forward to wrap my arms around her neck, and I cried. 

*

It would be hard again, with Shirley. This was just the first moment of breakthrough, a little vision of what was possible. Shirley would never become fully “broke,” the cowboy term which meant a horse was able to be ridden, but literally referred to the process of crushing a horse’s spirit. I never wanted to break Shirley—I’d hoped instead that we might move freely in mutual desire. There were many more outbursts, some injuries, rarer moments of soul-bound understanding.

It is too easy, and perhaps too dramatic to say that my relationship with Shirley would come to mirror every romantic relationship I would have, or that her patterns—her intensity and fear, her fleeting nature and eventual leaving—were also mine. Yet it feels true. 

*

For three years there were no boys at the barn, which made it sacred to me. Then, a new boarder arrived. The arrival of a new boarder was always precarious. They were typically middle-aged horse women, and therefore weren’t particularly entertaining additions to our little world. I was always grateful to them, though, because they were safe. What I feared most was that a girl our age would come and immediately usurp my role in Kate’s life. What I feared nearly equally was that a boy our age would come.

The summer I turned thirteen and Kate turned fifteen, a middle-aged Australian man started boarding his Stallion at the barn. He sold parts for submarines and made a lot of money doing it. For whatever reason, he decided he wanted to break into the horse breeding business. He visited the barn on weekends and brought his son Tanner, who was our age. Tanner had freckles and an adorable cowlick. He fell in love with Kate as quickly as I did. 

*

In the years I’d known Kate, I’d watched her become exponentially more boy crazy. When Tanner was at the barn Kate acted differently. She was bubbly, sometimes embarrassingly so. She teased him incessantly, clawing at his attention any way she could. Tanner was exceedingly boring, but surprisingly soft. He wore a baseball hat with his father’s company logo on it, and when he was nervous, he’d squeeze the bill in his hand, lift the hat just slightly off his head before placing it back on. The gesture mesmerized me. I saw almost nothing attractive about him aside from this, a physical manifestation of the boyish sturdiness I aspired to. The kind of quiet power girls like Kate might become obsessed with trying to understand but would never be able to break. 

When Kate wasn’t around, he and I got along just fine. I found a likeness in him that I would pretend was a crush if anyone should ask why I never talked about boys. It didn’t matter, though, because when the three of us were together, I felt an unyoked possessiveness. I was sullen and resentful at the first sign of Kate’s attention shifting from me to him. Despite my worst fears, though, I found she needed me no less when Tanner was around. In fact, my role grew. Instead of ignoring me, Kate would perform her power for Tanner by making me do ridiculous things. I jumped from haylofts, prank-called the gas station, stole Mt. Dews from the barn owner’s minifridge. “I swear to God she’ll do anything.” Kate said to Tanner, who only laughed meekly. 

*

By thirteen, I’d already known I was gay for years. Or at least I feared that I was a gay. I knew I loved girls more intensely than most girls love girls and I worried every day that I would never be able to stop. I’d been engaged in a war between shame and my powerful denial. I would feel a hot sick in my stomach looking at a girl, spend the rest of the day convincing myself it wasn’t desire, that I just loved women’s hair. I was constantly and magnetically drawn to women. Women at synagogue, women at the grocery store, a girl who worked at Sbarro in the mall, Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama, Mary from 7th Heaven, a painting of a woman that hung in the lobby of my doctor’s office. I yearned so hard for women that I often cried, powerless against my deep hunger for the simultaneous softness and bossiness I thought only women were capable of. 

I wasn’t just sentimental; I was horny too. “Girls Gone Wild” infomercials began at 11:00 p.m. and repeated again at 1:00 a.m. on the CW channel. I thought of Kate while watching the spring breakers take their tops off with a little prodding from Joe Francis. She was exactly the kind of girl men like Joe loved; busty, all-American, teeming with eagerness to betray the innocence they were barely clinging onto. It made me angry and it made me hot. A knife to my stomach, shame tinged with what might have been pleasure had I been brave enough to feel it. I’d watch for twenty, thirty minutes, unable to look away until my guilt and disgust overcame me, clammy and breathless as though in the grip of a terrible dream. I’d slap my face until it stung, and in the morning, I’d vow never to watch again. 

*

I was born into intensity, grew up in its chokehold, spoke no other language than my mother’s shapeshifting anger and suffocating love, my father’s boundless forgiveness and deep romanticism. A combination that would, many years later, make a therapist tell me that I was “bound to love without logic.” Which seemed, to me, extremely romantic. My house pulsed with rage not infrequently, someone always overheating, my mother or brother, usually. A home holds a million things to toil over: the bills, the dust, the piles, the disrepair, the mirrors, a life airtight in a container.

No one wanted to be at home, but spending time at home made my mother violent on occasion. Nothing you wouldn’t believe, but enough of a violence that I still flinch when someone speaks wildly with their hands, and I still feel a phantom grasp at the base of my throat when I’ve made someone mad. It is an understandable violence, violence I feel from time to time but never act on. Being home made my father inert, meek, and frequently grumpy. He filled in the negative space of her intensity. Both of my parents worked hard. We had little money and my mother’s impulsivity manifested mostly in shopping and home renovations put on credit. Both my parents worked long hours and several jobs because it was a necessity, my father found no real joy in laboring, but my mother loved to work. She worked constantly because she was afraid of what would happen if she had a still moment, a whole day without an itinerary, just bursting at its seams. A day in which she might have nothing to blame for her dread but herself. I am more like her than him. 

*

All said, these were salad days: six years dedicated solely to barn life, to barrel racing, jumping, and bareback races through unmowed pasture, to sprained ankles, chipped patellas, broken tailbones and wrists. To Kate and her boyfriends, to Kate and her games, her teasing, to Kate and my outsized desire. 

*

Boarding Shirley cost as much as a shitty one-bedroom apartment in our town. Because I was already spending fourteen hours a day at the barn, and because the cost of boarding Shirley was becoming untenable, my parents asked the owner of the barn—a flinty, wealthy woman—if I could work there as a stable hand. She agreed immediately, both because she felt a strong maternal pull towards me and because she’d already been exploiting my labor for the better part of a year, asking me to feed the horses, turn them out to pasture and bring them in most days. 

I began cleaning stalls at 6:30 a.m. during the weekdays and 8:00 a.m. on weekends. I woke up at 5:30, if it was winter, I dressed in my Carhartt overalls, Carhartt hat, Justin boots and put two pouches of “hot hands” in my pockets for days when my fingers froze rigid. If it was summer, I wore Wranglers and a faded fourth of July Gap t-shirt and boots. 

Most days I worked with Angi, a brassy, hard-shelled woman with short dirty blonde hair, a mouth full of snaggle teeth and a husky voice. She was always late because she had to drop her fiancé off at Sears, where he sold washers and dryers. Despite being fervently straight, Angi was the first butch I’d ever met. Despite that I was only thirteen and she was in her mid-twenties, our friendship was natural. She told me about her relationship, how she fought with her fiancé because he had an addiction to buying expensive car parts for his amateur race cars. We gossiped about barn drama (of which there was never a dearth,) and the ex-boyfriends that still reached out. We drank Mt. Dew and ate pizza Combos together on breaks.          

I became closest with Angi when Kate started spending time with a popular girl from her school. I still saw Kate most days, but anything less than all the time was too little for me, and I took turns wallowing pathetically and attempting to become aloof. An impossible task for me. The more I needed Kate, the less she wanted me. My intensity had always been hard for both of us to process, and harder now that she was busy becoming a teenage girl. 

*

I was not in love with Angi, which was notable, because I struggled to understand the difference between love and affection. Instead, I felt something kin like toward Angi. Not necessarily a queerness, but an openness, a different wind that blew through her, like she understood something I couldn’t quite speak. And yet, I tried to speak it anyway, always my mistake. I wanted to tell Angi about my brother, who was recently outed when my mother read his journal detailing many weekends fueled by drugs and gay sex. Instead, I decided to call him my sister, just to say she was a lesbian. I knew already that gay men and lesbians were received differently, especially by women, and I needed to know how Angi might respond to the news of a recently outed lesbian. I vacillated between hoping we’d share a tacit understanding, but worried that if she thought I was a lesbian she’d recoil from me. The idea that she might suddenly become strange, suspicious of our closeness, or of my affection for her, was too much to bear. 

“Is she ugly?” Angi asked matter of factly, no malice in her voice, just her usual temerity. 

“What do you mean?”

“Your sister, is she ugly? That why she can’t get a man?” 

“Oh, no, she’s like cute, like sort of normal cute,” I said. My voice uncontrollably tight and shaky.

“Sorry but it’s true, you seen many dykes before? They’re mostly ugly, unless they’re like fake porn lesbians,” she laughed. 

I didn’t want to match her unkindness by scanning her from head to toe. I didn’t want to focus on her face which I found unattractive, stony and oddly weathered for a woman in her twenties, or her ass which was square and so flat it was almost concave. Angi’s attractiveness hadn’t meant much to me before, but it meant everything now.

“God, yeah, I know,” I said, as I hoisted myself onto the tractor, kicked down on the clutch, and drove to the manure pile. I sat on the punctured yellow seat of the John Deere pulling a string of stuffing from under the duct taped vinyl, like I had a thousand times before. The sun dropped beads of sweat on my upper lip, the manure spreader flung horse shit into the air, the occasional particle landing in my hair. 

*

I didn’t hold it against Angi, but I knew I’d never be able to show her all of myself, either. I’d never told anyone about loving women and I wouldn’t for many years. Angi could have said anything to me, though; I would never have ended a friendship in those days. I needed everyone more than they needed me. Anyways, she had no idea that she’d just betrayed me in a serious, somewhat irreparable way. She could not have known that I’d chosen her, specifically, to test the waters. That she’d given me some unspoken permission to do so, and then failed me in what I imagined to be our implicit bond. Besides, I’d only ever seen a few dykes before, and I did find them ugly. 

*

Looking back at the photos of myself at the barn is painful now. Painful because I would do anything to return to this era of my life, but also painful because I was so ugly. Truly I was ugly. Looking into my permanently rouged, doughy face, my pubescent tits that rolled into one large mass along with my fleshy stomach, I can’t help but feel an ache for this child who was always longing for something she could not quite express, always feeling a bit more than what might allow her peace, and whose need reached long arms out to pull at anything that came close enough to grasp. It is little consolation that, despite feeling repellant, the middle-aged women of the barn patrons embraced me, taking turns mothering me, their beloved urchin. 

I was ugly, but I was also the most at home in my body then. I was always playing cowboy in my mind, but when I was cleaning stalls, driving the tractor, or throwing hay bales from the rafter, I was no longer imagining a self I wanted to be, somewhere between a boy and a dyke, I simply was. Barn culture does not valorize tidiness, femininity, bouncy hair, or even sex appeal. Instead, each radio in the barn played the country station, Travis Tritt, Alan Jackson, and Tim McGraw singing about crass women, heartbreakers covered in sweat and dirt, women who drank too much and rolled eyes at the manicured desire of pop ballads. 

We all valorized this kind of woman at the barn, the kind of woman that was “not like the other girls.” Kate especially so. She belched, farted, and spit constantly, each time making a point to justify her crudeness as a badge of country girl sensibility. We’d ride to the manure pile bareback and play chicken, steering our horses so close they’d bump each other, while we tried to push one another off our horse and into the shit. When Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman,” was released it became our anthem. Kate would roll the sleeves of her t-shirt up so she could perfect what she called a “redneck tan,” and we’d lay on a hayrack under the blazing summer sun for hours listening to the song on repeat. The opening lines said all that could really be said about the kind of femininity we aspired to: I ain’t the Barbie Doll type, no I can’t swig no sweet champagne, I’d rather drink beer all night, in a tavern or a honkytonk or on a four-wheel tailgate. 

Most days I wore Wrangler jeans, leather boots, and an oversized Realtree shirt. My hair was always greasy—a nimbus of sweat, sawdust, and hormones clung to me at all times. I didn’t think about my body much—aside from what it could lift and how it should look on a horse—a welcome reprieve from the preceding years spent hating my fat stomach, fat arms, fat everything. I’d get so dirty over the course of a day spent at the barn that my mother wouldn’t allow me to step foot inside the house in my barn clothes. I sat on a garbage bag in my father’s car on the way home, then stood on our back porch and stripped completely naked, stuffing my clothes in the garbage bag before running naked to the shower. 

*

I was comfortable in the filth of the barn, as were Kate and Angi. When I wasn’t at the barn, I was cleaner, but looked mostly the same, dressed in oversized t-shirts, Wranglers, boots, my hair pulled out of my face in a loose ponytail. It wasn’t until the first time Kate invited me to the roller rink with her that I recognized a crucial difference in our femininity. While I remained the same outside of the barn, she radically transformed. I sat on her bed and watched her put her hair up in a messy bun, pull out two equal chunks of hair, and press them between the metal plates of her Conair straightener until they framed her face. She rolled glitter onto her cleavage and over the apple of her cheeks, plumped her lips with sticky, red gloss, sprayed so much Victoria Secret’s “Love Spell” it shrouded her in a dense cloud. She wore tight shirts and tighter Wet Seal jeans, carried a miniature FUBU purse at her elbow. I must have worn shock across my face because she looked at me, smirked, and said “I clean up good, don’t I?” A line delivered with such womanly confidence I felt a chill pass through my entire body. 

Angi, too, was capable of a shocking transformation. She once stopped by the barn to pick up her paycheck. She was on her way to visit her fiancé’s parents. I hardly recognized her because she was wearing a dress, blue eyeshadow, soft ringlets. How a woman as tough and mannish as Angi could shapeshift was unsettling to me. It seemed as though there was something innately different in our DNA. I sat stunned in the tack room for an hour after she left, trying and failing to picture her in front of a vanity, methodically performing Eve’s labors, pulling tools from her makeup bag, knowing fully how each one worked. 

*

Angi was the first person I remember saying the word “dyke,” and despite that she meant it to cut, I couldn’t help but like how it felt in my mouth. The hard click, the monosyllable, something fetching about it. “Lesbian” was the ugliest word I knew, its sound bulbous, mired in images of flesh, spit, cold metal, and crewcuts. It would take another five years before I came so close to telling another person I was a lesbian, and another thirteen before I would call myself a dyke. 

*

When Kate joined volleyball, she began spending less and less time at the barn and I began spending more and more time alone. She had a whole new crew of volleyball friends. I spent days alone with Shirley, and sometimes Angi, nursing my deep longing to have Kate back, to be dragged through the fields by her, even to watch her text boys. When I did see her, I was too needy, or worse, resentful. I couldn’t hide my hurt, and it repulsed her. She was spending all her time with popular girls, going to their pool parties and learning which cut of shirt made her large boobs most appealing to the sorts of airheads with thick necks that she adored. I was praying for time to reverse itself. 

Still, alone at the barn was better than alone anywhere else. Alone at the barn came with none of the restlessness of being home alone or the solitude of slow, pensive hours. I’d throw Shirley’s lead rope over her neck and ride her bareback through the small strip of woods that separated the barn from a new housing development next door. Sometimes I’d lay back, my body along her body, looking up at the clouds. She’d amble along, wherever she wanted to go, usually to a lush patch of grass. It was as close to stillness as I’ve ever come. 

*

Halfway through eighth grade, I made friends with a group of girls at school and my life suddenly grew. We met in gym class, the four of us what our gym teacher referred to as “wallflowers.” We changed in the bathroom stalls instead of the locker rooms and hid under the bleachers during team sports. We were bonded by what we thought to be an anarchic anti-athleticism. We loved punk music and boys who wore eyeliner. 

They invited me to their sleepovers and went to the mall on weekends. I began spending less time with Shirley for fear of missing a single moment with my new friends. I was falling in love again, too, liberated from my heartbreak over Kate. I was immediately enamored with the group leader, a girl named Julia who played bass and wore low rise jeans and studded belts. She had an elven face and a nose that looked like it belonged to an anime character. I began spending my weekends with Julia instead of at the barn. Julia was just as boy crazy as Kate, but advanced in gender play. 

She’d dress me up like her emo boyfriend and we’d take pictures together to post on her MySpace. I wore tight hoodies and eyeliner, gelled my hair stiff across one eye, stood in a boyish way in front of her digital camera, trying to appear lanky and brooding. I’d sling an arm around her shoulder or her hips and she’d kiss my cheek. We’d spend hours roleplaying. As long as I was Matt, we could cuddle, I could hold her hand at the movies, become jealous of the real boys in her life without it seeming gay. 

*

My mother didn’t like my new music, my new dark clothes, or Julia. She didn’t like that I no longer wanted to spend every moment at the barn. She didn’t want to pay to board Shirley anymore, or drive me to see her. I was not falling out of love with Shirley, but changing in ways I could not control nor prevent. When I was with Shirley, I felt guilty, like I was betraying the only love that felt pure to me, in favor of girls who would only hold my hand as long as I pretended to be someone else. Yet, I was incapable of measure, always desperately seeking a little attention from a girl, overcome with euphoria at the handholding, the cuddling, the gender rebellion. My barn time began to feel obligatory. Something I did in the hours I wasn’t talking to Julia on AOL Instant Messenger, or on the phone.

* 

My mother had always threatened to get rid of Shirley if I didn’t clean my room, if I talked back or disappointed her in some way, but I never believed she would. I promised I would spend more time at the barn, but I found it too hard to spend time away from Julia and it never seemed like I could have them both.

*

My mother had a coworker who had a farm and wanted a horse. My mother picked me up from Julia’s one Saturday morning and drove me to the barn. She told me her coworker just wanted to meet Shirley, that nothing was going to happen for sure, but that I couldn’t embarrass her in front of her coworker or throw a fit about it. 

*

My mom’s coworker ran her hand down Shirley’s neck, told me she was beautiful, that she seemed like she’d make a great barrel horse. I cried into my sleeve until my mother told me to sit in the car. It must have been only a few days later that Shirley was gone. Loaded into a trailer and taken to the woman’s farm. The leave-taking was so excruciating I’ve repressed all memory of it. What I did in the hours after, I have no idea. My life cleaved in two, the barn days over, all the rest to come. 

*

I understood, then, the painful reality of actually falling in love: it always ends. Either the slow dissolution that was my love for Kate, and eventually Julia, or the unmatchable, tragic, blindsided pain of losing Shirley. 

*

Since then I’ve had a frequent, recurring nightmare. I am running to catch Shirley, and she is always just out of reach. She is in danger, and I am not there, where I should be, with her. I am somewhere silly: the mall, the bar, the party, the bed. 

*

It will take years, but I will find her again. Not in a dream, but at a barn in Queens where I take a job as a stablehand. Fifteen years and thousands of miles from that old red barn in Iowa, there she is–in the distinct aroma of horse hair and dust, old sweat dried on horse blankets, molasses sweet feed, the animal ripeness of horse shit, the blood-iron taste of hose water.

Each morning sixteen heads hang over their half-doors to greet me as the sun rises. It is an overwhelming kind of love I feel for them, and a familiar one.

Love full of risk, as all love is.