I Would Like a Hug

On giraffes, horses, and the little girl I almost left in the back seat

The writing prompt said: draw a giraffe with your eyes closed.

At first I was incredulous. Surely there were more important things to do with my hands. Then, from somewhere just behind my left ear, a small voice I hadn't heard in ages cleared its throat.

Ooh. Ooh!

Grab the iPad.

No. Paper.

Colours!

We need colours.

Wait, no, colours are too much, terrible idea.

The notepad. Get the notepad.

Let's draw three!

It was as if a Muppet had moved into my head overnight and found the control panel. Googly eyes. Arms flapping. A giggle she couldn't keep in. Absolutely no interest in my to-do list. Tania-in-charge usually wins these arguments. She has the calendar. She has the reading glasses. But Tania-in-glee was already bouncing on her felt feet, and she would not be talked down.

I closed my eyes, grabbed a pen, and did it.

One blindfolded giraffe. She's ridiculous. Her spots float above her body like they've had too much champagne. Her legs look like they're dancing with four different partners and losing track of all of them.

Drawing a giraffe blind is a lot like pinning the tail on the donkey. The fun isn't in the drawing. It's in opening your eyes after, and finding out exactly how far off you were.

Growing up, silly wasn't just frowned on. It was dangerous. Don't be silly meant you were wrong, and whatever good thing was happening was about to stop.

The first time I saw silly met any other way was with my friend Jen. Her little boy, Hunter, was jumping around like a monkey and sent his juice flying, and before his face could even crumple, she scooped him up. Silly goose. Let's mop up the spill together. Warm. Amused. Not one note of correction in it.

I remember being absolutely fascinated. The mess was real. The love didn't wait for it to be cleaned up first. Nobody scooped me up like that. Silly got tangled up with shame early, and it stayed tangled for decades.

* * *

Clare invited me to a barn. A full day. Equine therapy, she called it. I told her about the giraffe. The blindfold, the Muppet, Tania-in-glee bouncing on her felt feet. I laughed at myself the whole time I told it, half-braced for her to laugh at me too.

She didn't laugh at me. She smiled indulgently, and her eyes lit up. She saw the humour before I'd even described the outcome. She tilted her head forward a little, and I had the sense that if there'd been a pen and paper close by, she would have given it a try herself.

Bring her tomorrow, she said. The one who drew the giraffe. On purpose. Let's make the whole day a practice in learning to play.

Nobody teaches you the logistics of bringing a version of yourself somewhere. So I did the only concrete thing that occurred to me, which was also, in hindsight, unhinged. I went and stood in front of a painting. I knew that grin. I'd been hearing it natter behind my left ear all week. She's a girl in a floppy straw hat, black and white, striped shirt, lifting the brim off her own face with a grin so wide it looks like it hurts, pink and yellow graffiti loud enough to shout behind her. I found her in a village in the south of France, where I'd needed, more than anything, to reconnect with the blissful side of French Tania and stop feeling the heat of a hand that used to hold mine on those same streets. That afternoon there was a street fair. Music, champagne, cobblestones. My friend Gabby grabbed both my hands and we danced, no idea what our feet were doing, just following each other's bodies. I came off those cobblestones still laughing, walked into a gallery, and there she was. I squealed, out loud, in a gallery.

Impulse and recognition, both at once. I don't do that kind of thing.

The artist happened to be in. He dedicated her to me, to celebrate the day my new life began.

Then I had to get her home from the middle of nowhere. I carried her like a precious find from an archaeological dig. So standing in front of her that night, my rational self spoke up. You are not going to risk damaging this painting again.

I watched my hands lift her off the wall anyway. Steadily. Firmly. Not listening to a word. I put her in the back seat. Come on, I told her, clicking the seatbelt across the frame like she might slide off on a turn.

We're going to go see what happens with some horses. I want to walk in and squeal and hug every horse and tell them I love them and have them love me back. Actually. I want to feel the weight of a horse leaning into me. That thing they do, giving you their weight and their trust in the same moment. So how do you get a horse to fall in love with you? I'd read somewhere that horses mirror your energy. Fine. I would be calm. Grounded. Radiant, but not needy radiant. I'd walk in like a woman in a shampoo commercial, all slow motion and good intentions, and they'd sense my open heart and simply come to me, one by one.

I was auditioning. For horses. In my car. Out loud.

Somewhere around the second set of lights I stopped talking to her. I was too busy rehearsing the best version of myself a horse could possibly love. By the time I pulled into the gravel lot, I'd forgotten she was back there at all.

* * *
Clare asked me which horse I wanted to go to first. I pointed at the biggest one. Of course I did. Nine feet of horse, if he was an inch. Great, she said. Approach him whenever you're ready. And I turned around and headed west. He was east. I knew he was east. But it had occurred to me, suddenly and urgently, that the others might feel left out. So I did the rounds. Said hello to every horse in that barn like a hostess working the room at her own party, making sure nobody's glass was empty.

Two of them didn't lift their heads out of the hay. A human. Fine. Whatever. At the far end, an old mare watched me the whole time, steady, unbothered. I barely noticed her. I was busy. By the time I made my way back east, I'd spent half my nerve being polite to horses who hadn't asked.

This was supposed to be play. That's what scared me. Not the size of him, but the fact that I couldn't say, in front of a witness, exactly what I wanted without it sounding ridiculous.

Nowhere in the equine therapy brochure does it explain how, precisely, you communicate to a horse that you would like a hug. Do you project loving energy and hope he wanders over? Do you make the face you'd make at a baby? I stood there running through my options like a woman choosing cutlery at a state dinner, and it did not once occur to me to simply ask him. Or, for that matter, to ask Clare, who was standing three feet away, literally trained to help me do exactly this. In the end I looked up, trying to find his eye somewhere in all that horse, and just said it:

I would like a hug.

I swear I heard giggling from the back of the car.

His big soft lips moved like he was laughing too, and I decided it meant something. Then he came toward me in quick, staccato steps, and every cell in me wanted to do what a puppy does: giggle, skitter backward, circle in again only when it feels sure.

Instead I told myself to hold still. To be fine. To be the woman from the shampoo commercial.

A kid would have said it plainly: this one's too big. I want a different one. Before anyone teaches her it's rude to want things.

I'd made sure every horse in the barn felt welcome, and never once checked whether I did.

I don't keep my girl safe.
I wall her off and call it good manners.
People call me fearless.
It's not wrong.
I picked the biggest horse in the barn without blinking.

I've built a life walking straight at things other people back away from. What I didn't understand, until I heard myself say it out loud to a horse, is that fearless has also meant I haven't accompanied myself. Forward motion, outrunning my own presence.

I heard her giggle for half a second.

Then he turned his head toward the wall, and so did I.

* * *

He started chewing on the barn wood. Stopped looking at me completely. And I stepped in sideways and hugged him anyway, the way you'd steal a fry off someone's plate. Clare called it immediately. Is that really the kind of hug you want? When he isn't even here for it?

It wasn't dramatic.
It was small and it went in clean, like a splinter you don't feel until you press on it later.

I've been feeding my little girl leftovers. Not starving her. That would be easier to see, easier to name. Feeding her the picked-over, distracted, half-there version of the thing she actually asked for, and telling her it was dinner.

* * *

I walked past the ones who wanted nothing from me, all the way to the far end, to the old mare. She'd been watching me the whole time. This time I didn't rush it. One step. Another. I let her decide when we were close enough. She put her nose into my belly and pressed her whole face there like she was listening for something. Rested her forehead against my ribs. Then, very slowly, she scratched an itch on me. Leaned. Stayed. Not the biggest horse. Just her weight against me, and it felt like the warmth of being chosen.

Real turned out to be smaller and slower than anything I'd let myself imagine.

It was enough.
It was enough.
Immediately enough.

My legs are moving under the desk right now, telling you this. Like a kid's. I'd been so sure the hug had to come from the biggest one, the loudest yes, something I'd have to earn or stage-manage or ask for in exactly the right words.

I was that far off.

Standing with her, I could feel it: going toward something I want this badly has to include me. I have to be there too.

Not that it will be easy.

But I should feel at ease.

Safe.

My own hand between my shoulder blades, holding me up, gently reassuring me along.

* * *

I stood there with my fingers running through her mane, and from somewhere just behind my left ear came that giggle again, faint, like it was carrying all the way from the parking lot.

I answered it in Jen's voice, warm and amused: Silly goose. Hey, sweetheart. Let me scoop you up and tuck you into my pocket.

And that's when I realized she wasn't beside me. She was still in the car. So I left Clare with the horses and crossed the gravel alone. Opened the back door. There she was, still buckled in, hat lifted, laughing, exactly where I'd left her.

I felt like an idiot, a grown woman unbuckling a seatbelt from a painting in a parking lot.

I did it anyway.

Carried her in and propped her against a post where she could finally see the mare.

Clare grinned the same way we do when a third arrives in time to hold the other end of the skipping rope.

It's like we have a secret now.

* * *

I've spent a lifetime learning not to abandon myself. I did not see the next assignment coming: learning to abandon myself on purpose. Into experience instead of outcome. The way I did on those cobblestones with Gabby, the afternoon I found her. When I let myself go there, my eyes go up first. They smile wider. Even my eyelashes stretch, a little like a giraffe's.

I don't feel the weight of having to know everything ahead of time.

I just feel happy.

Human. Tender.

The space between my ribs goes a little elastic, and I can breathe.

The painting hangs in my writing studio now. Hat lifted, laughing, at home in the loudest chaos anyone ever sprayed on a wall behind her. She, on the other hand, comes with me. Most days she's still riding in the back seat. Buckled in safely.

But giggling so loud it's impossible to forget she's there.