I walk away the scab of sleep, boots covered in dirt the color of dried blood. Wondering how I'll know with certainty that I've stopped dreaming, or if I want to. I notice fresh tire tracks, follow them to a crumpled object against a juniper. The body wears the first light of a sun stumbling over the mountains. Beautiful, incongruent. I speculate how a dead horse ended up here along the path, intrigued by the mystery, the gore, the rupture of routine. How many people does it take to push a horse off the back of a truck? Did they use a hoist? Was this illicit waste disposal, or an offering? Wandering attention stops eventually in the throat as death tickles the back of my witnessing tongue. The foreplay to bloat and decay. I feel a momentary sense of dread, some cinematic suspense, then simply sadness at this creature dumped amongst the rusted cans and old whiskey bottles that litter these hills. I whistle for the dog and keep walking against the sunrise.
You had insomnia again last night so I decide not to mention the dead horse when you finally get out of bed. I'll save that one for later, a real conversation starter. I give you a kiss on the cheek as you take your morning melange of capsules/tinctures/teas. The flavor of the day is low-dose naltrexone. I can’t remember what it is or how it might work, just that you know people who have had positive results with it. Also that you took the rare step of verging into the world of allopathic medicine to get a prescription. I ask you how it’s feeling as you titer up your dosage. Fine. Hard to say. The only discernible effect after two months has been vivid dreams. I ask you about them, attempting to augur the day’s forecast from your subconscious. Partly cloudy with a chance of trivial conflict.
The next morning I spook a coyote off the corpse. They look reluctantly over a drab shoulder as they trot away from lunch. Later I read in a book on animal tracking that coyotes will usually enter a kill through the rear. The author doesn’t speculate as to why. I guess it’s a more welcoming orifice than the mouth - too much neck on a horse anyway. By now the excavation has burst open through the belly, mauve and kelp brown viscera crawling outwards. The musk of retired organs is pervasive. I cover my nose with a scarf then lower it, giving in to a notion that if I'm to be a voyeur I should experience the olfactory perspective as well. I sit on a rock nearby and play at meditation. Ravens and magpies watch me watching the horse from the spindly tops of piñons, waiting. I cough at the smell, scold the dog when I turn and catch her nibbling entrails. She folds her ears back and licks her lips.
Later you watch me with longing and veiled resentment as I lick salsa from my chin, eating a defrosted burrito for lunch. It’s not very good, but symbolizes everything your restrictive diet forbids: wheat, dairy, alliums, nightshades. Sugar, probably. I notice how I've picked up the questionable habit of seeing my able body as something to hide, soften, limit. There was a time in the honeymoon of our relationship when you tried a raw fruit and vegetable cleanse, this one championed by yet another white wellness savior. I can't remember his name but he’s the reason some health food stores have a two-bunch limit on celery. I endeavored to juice and smoothie and salad with you as a gesture of support, thinking two weeks of runny stools was a substantial feat of devotion. You didn’t feel any better physically, but I think I charmed your heart. You often cite this act in reference to my currently fading dietary solidarity. I've decided I can eat wheat bread and still love you.
Covid brought a cultural reckoning with chronic illness, a glimmer of validation for people like you. Capital pays attention when the labor force is crippled by death and long-haulers. We believed that something might actually change as disability justice got some likes and a hot moment in identity politics. It didn't last long. Fooled again by hope, or perhaps we were just naive. People talk about the pandemic in the past tense now, relieved that it’s over. We say that we’re still dying, more and more living with unexplained symptoms, but people are done listening. The data is only important when it supports your story. There are new yard signs to hide behind. We keep stepping backwards, looking for open doors and windows while tightening masks against our faces. Watching as the inexorable gravity of normal seduces society further away each day, wondering what this side of the chasm is called. Are we the ones still dreaming?
A week later and the horse is a hollow shipwreck, ribcage bared to the quartermoon. The jetsam of carrion eaters strewn amidst a palimpsest of tracks printed in the dirt. Canine, avian, rodent. I'd been planning on taking the skull at some point, putting it in the living room next to the monstera as an object of artful reverence, but it was gone. The neighborhood dogs have different notions of aesthetics, more practical than mine. The sun keeps rising, I keep walking. I gauge the passage of time by the disappearance of flesh. The legs are the last to go, then the hoofs are all that remain untouched. Four big toes and a jumble of bones. Hide and mane a molted costume twitching in the wind. Maybe I'll take a hoof, dangle it on a wall. A reminder of something I'm trying to learn.
We are so tired, but still we fight again over cancelled plans and negotiations of risk. Time collapses in on itself and I search for meaning in the tracks we’ve left behind. In march of 2020 I write: I feel small, I’ve made my self so small to make space for you. I could disappear completely. Followed by this: I feel scared. I feel so scared at the possibility of you getting sick. Of you dying. I try to bury it so I don’t have to feel it. Years drift along. I have not been steadfast. I have pushed and equivocated and fantasized of independence, of luxuriating in my able-bodied privilege. The bacchanalia of unmasked hugging or eating inside of a restaurant. I’ve said hurtful things like I'm tired of living a life dictated by your anxiety. I have stumbled a dubious spectrum between support and melancholia. Felt helpless as the dynamic of our relationship slowly evolved without a definite reason to point to. Is this just our life now? I like to think I've grown, graduated to some species of acceptance. Today I write: the balance of care is skewed, but it will equilibrate eventually. You are sick, but illness does not define you.
And yet. I've watched you burn through the cycle of hope and despair far too many times now. Spectating from the sidelines as you chase the chimera of diagnosis. Realized how common this is for so many people trying to simply find a name for their uninvited guest, wandering the abyss of nomenclature. A cohort united by shelves full of supplements and somatic psychotherapy and infrared saunas and antibiotics and gu theory and lymphatic drainage and nervous system retraining and antidepressants and frog venom medicine and scouring internet forums and every. god. damned. diet. and positive thinking and embracing rage and ozone therapy and each time it just might be the thing that makes a change. But it doesn’t. Or maybe it does, for a little while, but then you’re flared up again and it’s hard to tell. Your hope is a bad dog on the couch. I try to be supportive, offer up my own cautious optimism, but mostly I just listen and ask if you want to rest your head against my chest. I can't think of any words that don’t feel hollow, I am bereft of language for this. We learn together to interrogate the notion of a cure.
Then there are those moments of blissful reprieve, when you have a good day and feel rich with energy. When we went mountain biking and you flew down hills through mud and snow, trilling like the graceful bird you truly are. Laughing face freckled with wet earth. The day before you woke up feeling fifty. This day you wear an exuberance half that age and seem to embody a different person entirely. So many characters, within you. I felt simple joy riding bicycles together in the winter sun, dashed with that frustratingly human sense of loss. Unable to fully enjoy the present because it only emphasized how some alternate version of us could be, but isn’t. I hold your hand while you hold a mirror aloft for me to see the work of love ahead.
The mornings keep coming. Again I squat on my haunches prodding bones with a stick, treating the horse as some strange piñata. I've been scouring this skeleton for meaning, a compelling story reflected in my changing moods. Some days it feels brutal, like hope is just an illusion that vanishes with time. Others it is more uplifting, something about how we can learn to let one part of us die to nourish the others. That dreams do not disappear but only change form. I sigh and remember to stop trying so hard. I pinch a leaf of sagebrush under my nose, close my eyes and listen to the wind broadcast the calls of corvids. The horse is just a dead horse. We’re just two people dreaming how to love again and again in this beautiful horrible world.
Peter McInerney is a carpenter and metalworker living in the mountains of northern New Mexico. He can be found at www.mcinerneymetal.com.
Photo by: Peter McInerney