For the wild horse, these ruthless new hunters would be both an ark and an accelerant to their extinction.

Laura and I have taken a liking to the gallop track. The horses love it. We ride out behind the barn, where this week we interrupted two very young jackrabbits eating their lunch. The meadow in the oak forest is waist-high in wildflowers: camomile, sky lupin, red maids, Indian paintbrush, dandelions, thistles, miner’s lettuce, California buttercup. There are cicadas in the oak trees, ground squirrels galore, stately blue herons and a hummingbird fiercely defending his sage scrub. It is impossible, how much I love this place.

Against its nature, the terrified prey animal is turned into an incarnation of terror which drives the predator, man, to flee

The horse was born not in Troy, but in Alexandria: it is a phantom of the library

The connections forged between humans and horses nowadays are relationships based on love, communities of interest and sporting camaraderie.

the native language of equine history is Arabic.

Nobody would have noticed the waif-like boy who hung around the Paris horse market for days on end, in 1851 and the following year. Confident that he was unobserved, he scribbled away on the notepad he took everywhere with him, like a painter on his travels. Nobody recognized him as a young woman dressed as a man, pursuing her ambitious plan.

girls and horses are islands in the flowing river of time.

Somewhat like a precursor to cybernetics, only more direct: a neuro-navigation between interrelated natures. Two moving, loosely coupled systems, circumnavigating the lengthy route of thought, exchanging information directly via the short cut of touching nerves and tendons, thermal and metabolic systems. The act of riding means that command data is transferred in the form of physical data, in a direct exchange of sensory messages. Riding is the connection of two warm, breathing, pulsating bodies, mediated only by a saddle, a blanket or mere bare skin. Humans enter into similar informational connections when they dance together, wrestle or embrace.

Last year I had three outstanding piles of paperwork I needed to address: my US citizenship, the buyback on my diesel Volkswagen, and (a stretch goal) qualifying for a mortgage. Yesterday I had to reschedule the VW buyback appointment because my Naturalization Oath Ceremony is scheduled at the same time; and, on March 26, Grant’s birthday, we got the keys for a house half a mile up the road from our beloved micro-apartment.

It’s painfully ugly and has asbestos, termites, foundation problems, and vinyl siding, but by the time we found out what it’s gonna cost and how long it’s gonna take to renovate it, I had already bonded with Neuhaus. Our meet could not have been cuter. Jeremy and I took a months-long break from serious house-hunting after various offers fell through. One Sunday afternoon in March we forced ourselves out to look at five impossible places, just to get back in the habit of looking. One of the impossible places was next door to a place with a deep garden. I said to Jeremy: “I know it’s unfeasible, but I kind of ache for a garden.”

We got home after the fifth impossible place and I said, “Dammit. I forgot one.” Jeremy said: “Do you want to go and look?” “No,” I said. “…Yes.” We got there just as it was closing. I walked through the basement into the garden and my heart lifted. Our offer came in second but the sellers gave us the opportunity to counter and when we did, they let us have the place. We got it on Richard’s birthday.

It was an estate sale. The couple who lived there were San Francisco natives, married for 48 years. She died at home last summer. The place is full of their love, the plywood shelves he built for her with utmost care in his basement wood-shop, the Mamie pink bathroom, achingly fashionable in its day, her roses and calla lilies in the garden. May we somehow deserve this inheritance.

It was one of Kami’s earliest memories, the look of fear on her mother’s face as she watched Kami. “I’ve been scared all my life,” Kami said slowly. “I’ve thought I might be crazy all my life, and you did it to me.”

I am beginning to think that there are some events that simply cannot be “processed,” some things one never gets “over” or “through.”

The more I take the time to look at things, the more rewards and complexity I find.

Aminat has her own story; she is not a supporting character of yours.

I am heartbroken but at peace.     Last night, before getting some sleep, I came in to see if he needed anything. I tucked him in and kissed his forehead.     “Do you know how much I love you?” I said.     “No.” His eyes were closed. He was smiling, as if seeing beautiful things.     “A lot.”     “Good,” O said, “very good.”     “Sweet dreams.”

Of course all you have to do is brag about your distress tolerance one time and the panic attacks come back.

There’s definitely a component of “I’m in a safe place to process shit, so shit’s coming up” going on. I’m trying to write about Australia and (surprise!) I have a lot of complicated feelings to untangle about Australia. I need to talk about it in a kind of Darmok way because it’s not rational, or linear, or English.

A book I think about all the time is Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood, a memoir of finding your birth mother in Korea and then losing her to cancer, before you have time to learn enough Korean to say what you need to say. My mother and I didn’t communicate very well until very close to the end, when I had slowly, painfully taught myself enough about kindness to counteract my habitual ruthlessness. Immigrants are ruthless, my mother included. We jettison the past. We buckle ourselves into the geographical cure, and we don’t look back. If you look back, you turn to salt.

My bitterest memories of living in Australia are memories of living with untreated, out-of-control mental illness. What I’m feeling now are body-memories of the days when I had panic attacks 24/7. In Ireland, I found some distance (“some” = the width of the planet); in California, I found SSRIs. Now at last I can let myself understand what I gave up in exchange for these: the outlines of sacred animals on the high rocks, the Southern stars, the smell of eucalyptus trees hot under the summer sun. A landscape that made sense to me somewhere deeper than language.

Nearly all the queers Michelle knew were fuckups in one way or another. Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of.

How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it.

“Do you think anything will really be different after the war?” Rachel asked. She felt afraid even to voice the idea. Did one wilderness only give way to another, on and on into eternity?

It turns out that if you let me mooch off Mister Jeremy and spend my time however the hell I like for most of a year, it’ll be one quarter community organizing to resist the Trump agenda (weekly visits to local members of Congress plus get out the vote canvassing in our nearest GOP-held district), one quarter supporting under-represented minorities in the tech industry, one quarter writing gay science fiction, and one quarter snoogling horses. I don’t know why I’m surprised. I doubt anyone else is.

It’s possible my surprise Sabbatical is coming to an end, and I don’t know how to feel about that.

Can I even express my gratitude to my mister of eighteen years and one day for his fabulous awesometude and generosity, signs point to no. My advice for a happy marriage is to marry the kindest, smartest, most curious and emotionally intelligent person you have ever met, and then try to deserve them.

“I’m scared. It’s so important, and I’m not sure I’m up to the job.”

“Let me put it this way. Do you trust anyone else to do it?”

“Oh HELL no.”

For those of us raised by mothers and fathers who experienced such trauma firsthand, it is impossible not to continue this remembering.

“It will all be terrible,” said Cuerva Lachance, patting her on the shoulder, “but let’s pretend it won’t.”

“Of course if you had a robust praxis around intersectional feminism, you’d’ve already figured that out.”

“You’re so right.”

“No. I’m just lucky that your friendship-orientation is towards heinous bitches. I can be my true self.”

Evidently, I should’ve read this years ago.

“Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god… Our best machines are made of sunshine… They are floating signifiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-weavings of the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg webs of power so very well, than by the militant labour of older masculinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs.”

Or maybe it’s fine that I waited. The extent to which it speaks to me right now is a little uncanny.

This one is for all the other adult orphans out there. Yesterday was the third anniversary of Dad’s death. Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of Mum’s. I call this Shark Week and even though I don’t believe in astrology or the significance of dates, I always find myself glum.

That’s all right though. When I was younger and recovering from depression, I was flinchy around any negative emotion, in case it dragged me down into the dark again. But with age and having watched a lot of sad movies (on dates that Jeremy and I like to call distress tolerance dinner theatre) comes the ability to sit with my grief and not try to stuff it away in a box so much.

I will be 47 this month, and it turns out that I can think about Jean and Robin and how complicated and flawed and wonderful they were, and how their awkward and hilarious and tragic love affair is literally what I am made of, and have a bloody good cry about it, and not die.