I'm Sorry, Please Forgive Me

I'm Sorry, Please Forgive Me (I love you, thank you) This week, I’m thinking about all the things we apologize for that might not require an apology at all. Things like: talking to ourselves, talking to horses, taking up space, having bodies that change. Things like having feeling things we would rather pretend we don’t feel. It begins with a client asking me if it’s okay to speak to a horse and Penny, our resident Amish unicorn, once again refusing to walk over a pole. It wanders through the strange intimacy of discovering my own back in the shower and realizing that, after a lifetime spent believing otherwise, I am not weak. I am not damaged. I am capable. And then we arrive at schadenfreude. Exactly one year after learning that we would have to leave the farm we called home for twenty years, I went looking for information about the subdivision proposed for the land we left behind. What I found cracked open something I thought I had put away. This is an essay about the spells we cast when we say things aloud, the bodies we misunderstand because we cannot see them clearly, the strength that sometimes reveals itself only after the thing we feared most has already happened, and the complicated little bubbles of satisfaction that rise to the surface when life hands us an unexpected ending. There is also: horse emergencies during showers, hay in places that defy physics, a Belgian named Drax escaping through a stall window, the indignities of aging, Friday’s perpetually missing neck collar, buried horses, hypothetical hauntings, and one deeply satisfying opportunity to say: I f*****g told you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you. Written and read by Kim Carter Stable Roots / Relatively Stable Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe