Ten Times I Said No To Love: Chapter 5

Gravity Doesn't Ask for Permission

I never imagined there would be such a glorious response to this week’s launch of my Relatively Stable podcast. Within a day, episode one ranked in the top 50 percent of all podcasts. It’s now live in all the spots where you like to listen: Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, but the home base where you can find all the episodes, notes, and behind the scenes magic is here at Stable Roots on Substack.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the support of everyone who subscribes to Stable Roots and receives my words in their inbox every week. Thank you. When I launched this space in March, I was prepared to evolve slowly (in the famous words of the man who founded the farm, the space where I’m privileged to live and work every day) — but I didn’t foresee the enormous support of you all and the delight of watching this tiny seed grow to bloom. THANK YOU.

A big theme that Sarah Farris and I discuss in the first episode is the human tendency to be in love with love. We see this all the time with the horses. People arrive at the farm expecting the mythical beauty of these majestic creatures to fix the gaping holes in their lives, that horses will re-connect them with passionate wonder.

And then the horse steps on their foot, or bites them, or refuses to move forward. It’s like being punched in the face by a unicorn. It’s devastating in a subconscious, visceral way that can’t be described with logic.

We do that to the humans around us too, but the effect is quieter and sneaky. It’s so normal, it just feels like life, so we don’t notice it.

Chapter 5 of my story begins with an injury and ends in denial.

If you’re joining me for the first time, you can read (or listen to) previous sections of my story, Ten Times I Said No To Love here:

|| Chapter One || Chapter Two || Chapter Three || Chapter Four ||

Let’s get started.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

---

Ten Times I Said No To Love

Most of the problems of the world stem from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.

—

Elif Shafak

5. Gravity Doesn’t Ask for Permission

I arrange bales of hay in the rear of the white, trailer that serves as forage storage at the farm. It’s parked far away from the nerve center of the property so the semi-truck that arrives in a chaotic rhythm of supply and demand can maneuver in and out of the tight, overgrown gravel driveway.

A loaded trailer is dropped and the empty container is spirited back to Kentucky where the hay grower will ply his trade in the land, at the mercy of rain and pestilence.

Growing hay is a prayer of anguish and thanksgiving.

I think about hay when I wake in the morning and hay is the last thing I think about at night. More often than not, it is the thing that haunts me in the middle of the night when I wake with the nagging feeling that there is something that I’ve forgotten.

A horse cannot live without roughage. They’re hind gut fermentors with two colons. Their digestive tract functions as if it were designed by a committee that couldn’t came into agreement. The number one killer of a horse is a stomach ache. They’re designed to eat continually, needing a constant supply of nutrient-light roughage every waking moment. In a biologically perfect world, this would happen with continual free-choice grazing, but we domesticated these beasts and told them we would take care of the food supply as long as they worked beside us, didn’t buck us off their backs, and built civilization for us.

I bring large loads of hay into the farm from a trusted grower, take what is needed each day for the horses to eat at the farm, and sell the rest to small farms in my community. This supports my addiction while also guaranteeing my supplier that I will purchase enough volume to make it work his time to support me as a dealer.

“I want eight bales of the crack hay,” a client says.

I toss hay down from the trailer to this repeat customer who supplements her horses’ diets with my legume-rich product grown in the early spring rainy season. Her horses devour this hay and don’t leave a stem on the ground.

It’s late summer now and drought strips the color from the fields. The trailer is newly parked, stacked to the top, and the hay bales are difficult to maneuver. Fourteen feet in height and packed to the ceiling, I’m phobic of removing the first bale when a new load arrives. The stacks shift in transit. It’s like clambering up a wobbly rock wall.

From my perch four bales high in the back of the trailer, I stare down at the client’s truck, the bed filled with fresh hay. The drop to the ground is merciless. I realize that I’ve boxed myself in and the jump from this beast is too high for me to maneuver.

“Can you back your truck up closer so I can use it to step down?” I ask.

The client expertly maneuvers her truck almost flush with the rear of the hay trailer. I brace my arms on the edges of each, start to ease my way down, and my foot slips.

I come down hard on my leg.

Something inside of me snaps.

And I don’t mean snap as in my emotions break loose. I mean something literally snaps. I reach down reflexively and feel my kneecap isn’t where it’s supposed to be, it’s not symmetrical and no longer in the spot that it’s been tucked nicely since my birth.

The client hands me cash for the hay and I stare at the bills as if they hold an answer. She needs change.

“My knee —” I say, “has moved.”

I’m not thinking straight, but like the time a sliver of the barn siding slid beneath my fingernail and I instinctively pulled it out with my teeth, I reach down and push my kneecap back to where it belongs.

I count out four ones and hand the bills to the client. My mind is no longer housed inside my body. I’m removed, disassociated.

It’s a busy Saturday at the farm and I saved minutes earlier by driving my truck to the hay trailer instead of walking. This is a blessing. I press my unaffected leg against the ground and tap it forward to see if it works. Using the hay trailer for leverage, I hop to the truck. There is bile in my throat as the diesel hums into life.

I ignore my own signs I posted to keep traffic away from the front of the barn and drive past the parking area to a spot in between the barn and the riding arena.

Bracing with my arms, I ease myself out of the truck, reconsider, and haul myself back into the driver’s seat.

I’m not saying this farm is magical, but sometimes it feels like a stage production with props delivered on cue. I reach over for a cane propped beside me on the bench seat of the truck. I found it beside the arena years ago and I keep it around to use the crooked handle to pull down the first bale of a fresh load of hay.

I’m beginning to shake.

I flag my hand at Trish with her headphones. I mouth for her to grab Sarah.

“I think I dislocated my knee,” I say, as I use the cane to press my good leg on the ground. I hobble to a mounting block at the edge of the arena and sit there until I feel sick.

“Should I go to the house and get ice?” Sarah asks.

Ice is always a good idea and the retrieval of it kills time, like walking to the barn to fetch a water bottle for a difficult student. Buying time can be a constructive and noble act when you have no idea what to do next.

I can’t be still and I can’t move well. I hobble to the center of the barn and bark at everyone I find there, telling them to leave me alone, be quiet, and go somewhere else. I slide straight-legged into the dirt in front of the hay loft steps.

I am nauseous and shaking and aware that these sensations are a form of shock. I can’t assess the pain in my knee but I am also aware that I’m not supposed to yet.

My phone rings. I answer it independently from any thought process. I am at a reflexive loss.

“I’ve left him and I’m stopping for gas on my way out of the city. Can you give us a place to hide for a few days so I can figure out my next steps?” Morgan lives on the coast, four hours from the farm. Her daughter and she have wanted to leave their home and rebuild their lives for a long time.

“Start driving and get here,” I say.

Sarah returns with ice and tells me the instructors have arranged who will cover my afternoon lessons. The worst of the sickness is passing and my perception begins to shift from my head, lower, down into my body.

The horses are fed their afternoon grain. Clients are diverted to another section of the barn. Where I sit in the dirt is at the center of the structure, a juncture of outward-facing shed rows that converge in the middle. Built to the demands of a brilliant British instructor many decades ago, the central crossroads of open hallways in the barn catch the summer breeze and provide holy shade when the sun is thick and relentless.

Like the details of light returning to dilated eyes, I begin to form sentences and explain to Sarah what happened to my knee at the hay trailer.

Sarah motions for me to try to put weight on my leg. I can always rely on her for a fair and reasonable assessment. She provides balance, whether the threat is an armed convict being chased by police in the woods around the farm or a horse with a swollen fetlock, she never wastes time trying to impress people with pseudo-knowledge. She’s the real deal — and she’s super smart.

“I’m not sure I can stand on it,” I say.

“Should you try?”

“Maybe later.”

Sarah looks around to where we’re stationed in the dirt at the base of the stairs. “At least you found a way to stop everyone gathering in the hallway.”

Seeing comes before words.
-John Berger

I drive myself back to the house.

Within sight of the barn, the path leading to the house is bordered by two old, sentry oak trees. The energy shift as one passes through their shadows is palpable, a transition from work to solace. The house feels protected.

I hobble into the back room lined with windows and I ease myself onto the couch. I tie an ice pack against my knee with an old, fancy scarf.

I hear the voice in my knee, like the time my Turkish ex-husband fell off a horse, broke his collar bone, and arrived home with the fox hunting master’s stock tie as a sling and said that when he collided with the ground he, “. . .heard the voice.”

I pick up my phone and search for symptoms of a dislocation, hoping for this outcome and not a tear that requires surgery. Despite my belief that the barn can’t weather my taking time off for surgery and recovery, the gates are still open after my hysterectomy the previous year. My insurance deductible is massive. I tally the better ways I could spend my savings, counting out fives, tens, fifteens on my fingers.

Because there is this: I have no one left to steer the ship for me.

And by ship, I mean life. My life is a pirate fleet of responsibilities: to myself, my parents, the farm, most of them self-made, some that were inherited. I’m rich with acquaintances but I don’t have anyone to call in sick for me, to serve as my proxy. I know this intellectually, but owning it in practicality only happens when my body forces me to stop.

There is an epidemic of loneliness in the world, but we don’t have studies quantifying the individuals who are not lonely, they’re simply alone.

I am a lone — what? Wolf? More like a puppy.

My mother buzzes my phone with questions from the kitchen.

I use the furniture for leverage and hobble back through the house.

“We’re having visitors overnight,” I say.

My mother folds a towel. “There are already people on the porch,” she says.

I activate a fresh, single-use ice pack by bashing it with my fist against the table and consider the odds of me successfully going back to my rooms to hide instead of visiting with people on the porch.

My odds are slim. They’ll come inside eventually and find me.

“Galileo was considered a heretic, and yet here we are all heliocentric and tiny,” Trish holds theoretical court as Christopher sits with her at the big, porch table. He looks all showered and fresh. He smells nice.

I situate myself on the cushions of the couch between them. “Morgan left her husband. She’ll be here in a few hours,” I say.

I hadn’t invited Christopher, per se, but Saturday dinners are a thing now, with or without others. I’m simultaneously thankful that he’s here and annoyed that I have to interact.

“I can drive you to the doctor,” he says.

“Maybe later.”

“You really should see a doctor,” Trish says.

“Maybe. What are we doing?”

“I’m waiting with you until Morgan gets here and then I’ll pick up dinner,” Christopher says.

It’s hot on the porch. I almost tell Christopher that I’ve been writing a story about him driving me through the mountains in his fast car as I pretend to be working during the day. I almost tell him that I’ve changed our names and given us alternate professions so no one knows that I’m writing about us, except he would know if I let him read it. I want him to know that I was trying to write a thing about two good friends, but it kept trying to turn into a love story.

But it’s awkward enough with me walking with a cane and unexpectedly finding him on the porch when I had been secretly hoping he would show up before the hay trailer fiasco. And I don’t want Trish to know because she’ll give me all the reasons why I shouldn’t and she’ll tell me how I have a habit of making poor choices in love. She’ll do this by implication rather than saying it outright, which is worse than being given direct points I can argue. Plus, she’s right.

“How was your week?” I ask Christopher.

“Interesting. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Thank you for asking me to the concert,” I say, but I don’t tell him that I haven’t decided if I’m really going yet.

---

Trish is gone by the time Morgan arrives, her car crunching on the gravel drive before coming into view. Christopher walks slowly to keep up with me as we greet her.

Morgan is fueled by adrenaline and decisive action. We settle her into the guest room. The unfamiliar sound of the television and the flowing-water energy of her daughter fill the empty corners of the house to the ceiling. Their presence reminds me of how quiet the farmhouse has been this past year. It’s interesting being the safe haven in a relationship crisis instead of my typical role as the fulcrum cracking under pressure.

I watch Christopher’s immaculate care for Morgan and her daughter, and for me as I park myself on various seats, my leg propped, my leg down, new ice. It’s weird having someone in my house taking over the roles of instigator/fixer/greeter.

I will tell him my thoughts by the end of the night, I say to myself. I’ll come clean. I know this will crack open the perfect ideal of possibility, that there will be no coming back from this.

On second thought — maybe I should just leave this as a perpetual longing, unsullied, unrealized, and incomplete. This feels safer.

Dinner is an afterthought of plates and cold pizza. No one gathers in the same place once, even though I’m mostly stationary.

It is nearly dark when Morgan informs me that the faucet in the guest room tub isn’t working.

“Can you plumb?” I ask Christopher.

“I can try.”

I hobble behind him and perch on the closed toilet seat as he kneels on the cold enamel of the tub. He fiddles with the faucet.

At this mutual height, we are eye to eye. As he’s busy problem-solving, I am involved with giving him a continuous, baffling re-telling of the day’s events.

I’m not paying attention to the details of what he’s doing, so when he motions for me to look at the problem, I turn to face him before gauging our proximity.

“This isn’t going to be a simple fix,” he says.

It never is.

When I studied art history I became aware of how artists hold the power of shifting human perception, of how they help us see something that was once normal, habitual, ordinary in a new way.

I only see what I have programmed myself to see — until I see something else.

As I sit on the toilet seat at the edge of the tub, I’m given a glimpse of seeing Christopher as he is, and not how I’ve learned to see him. It’s like the weird day has altered the ditches that direct the flow of patterns in my head.

With Christopher this close, I see him. I — finally — see him. And this seeing is not what I want him to be or what I’ve been told I need to find, or a fog of what I hope he’ll end up being.

I just see him.

There is this swoosh, like the bottom falling out, a dream-caught sense I’ve only felt before when I’m writing, the sensation of a presence beyond me, but also of me. This is what I feel in the briefest moment as Christopher’s eyes lock with mine.

I’m sitting on the toilet seat. He’s kneeling in the tub.

And then it’s gone.

Like a heavy divider bisecting an expansive room, I immediately shut this fleeting, enormous, sensation down. I hoist myself up and hobble back through the house toward the porch.

I pass Morgan who says something I don’t catch. The house is filled with people, but I’m bothered by the sound of my own thoughts.

I know what I’m capable of believing when I sign my powers away to the hope of another human. I’ve spent more time making amends for the abuse I’ve given myself in the hands of another person than I’ve spent living.

I reach the porch, arrange a pile of pillows on another chair in front of me, prop my leg up, and fold forward against the fortress of cushions.

My phone dings.

“Did you collapse in a heap?” my mother texts from where she watches me through a front window.

Christopher emerges from the house and sits down beside me at the big, porch table.

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you,” he says.

“I’m tired. I don’t have the energy to hear anything right now,” I say.

“My ex has moved out of my house,” he says.

“That’s good,” I say, but I take it all back. I don’t want him to be free.

“I’m in a relationship with myself now,” he says. “Like you.”

I breathe myself further down into the cushions. “I need to go to bed now. Thank you for coming tonight.”

“Well, okay. Goodnight,” he says, but he waits until I’m steady with my good leg beneath me before he makes a move to leave. His kindness triggers me.

I hear Christopher’s car start up as I shut the door behind me. I have dreamed myself into horrors more times than I can count. I’m not going to do that this time. I’m not going to ruin the possibility of goodness with the reality of action. The guest room door is closed and I hear Morgan talking to her daughter inside. I’d spent months erasing the memory of my past in that room with layers of bright, soothing paint.

I’m content with only having the idea of him, I think, as I prop my leg up soundly and go to sleep.

|| Chapter 6 ||

---

I found this guy sleeping in a new, little dahlia bloom when we were watering the garden the other night.

Thank you for joining me for Chapter 5. Next week I’ll leave the farm and take us on a trip to Colorado with a force of nature in tow. Until then, I’m going to package a newsletter within a newsletter and give you a link to all September farm events here. (Note - the day for Half Halt is Thursday, September 26 — I was looking at the wrong month as I wrote the dates.)

The calendar is light because Christopher and I are marking the days until our wedding on the 21st. We chose this day because it fell on a weekend that we had planned to travel months ago, but the trip fell through. I’d like to say that we chose it because the day is immortalized in Earth Wind & Fire song September, but we didn’t realize this until after the fact.

My dress is here. The flowers, cake and caterer are lined up. We thought we’d chosen a spot in the farm forest near the spring that feeds the pond to say our vows, but when we were surveying the spot a tree started to cry, creak, and moan in a way that neither of us had ever heard before — and we’ve spent some time in the woods both individually and together. We took this as a sign to choose a different spot.

Your presence with me on this journey of words and memories is a true gift. Thank you for sharing my story and giving me the space to tell it.

Until next week —

Love,
Kim