A story about horses, part eight

            I remember the last time I rode a horse, as of this writing. I rode Annie, because she would do anything for H., so H. and I took her to a round pen to give me a riding lesson. I was in college, and I would have been seventeen or eighteen at that time.
           It was my first time in a Western saddle. But that didn't really matter. I just felt all wrong. I could not relax. My body was wound up tight like a spring squeezed between your thumb and forefinger. No stretching would loosen me up. Nothing felt right. Annie walked for me, but she flicked her ears back and forth, and kept peeking back at me to see if I was all right up there. Then we tried trotting, and each step jolted me in a different direction. I could not post, because my body was bouncing and flinging back and forth and side to side and I could not feel my thighs settling the way they used to.
            I could squeeze tighter. I could hang on. But I could not relax, and I could not use the reins to guide Annie because I was using my hands to hang on to her mane and the horn of the saddle. I did not pull at her mouth. I let the reins flap and tried not to fall. I had never felt like I might fall before. Annie bucked a little, just tiny hiccups in her stride. She pinned one ear, then the other, and shook her head. After a bit, she stopped trotting and turned her head around to look at me. "Are you ok?" she seemed to ask. I wasn't, really. I was confused. My body was betraying me. Annie refused to trot more than two steps at a time for the rest of the lesson.
            This feeling that my body was a sack of grain flopping all over the place was alien. I remember what it was like to ride, before. I remember a time when I could sit on a horse that was spooking sideways and leaping into the air, and think to myself, "Oh, what did he see over there?" not, "Yikes! I'm falling!" I remember a time when I dreamed of putting a bridle on Mark and flying across the bright summer grass with him, together, as though we were one animal. I never got to ride him that way. And now my last memory of riding is one of simply trying not to fall. And trying not to make Annie's back too uncomfortable with my bouncing, clinging efforts to stay attached to it.