They had the prettiest apples

"And the woman liked the snake very much. Because when he talked, he made little noises with his tongue. And his long tongue was lightly licking about his lips. Like there was a little fire inside his mouth, and the flame would come dancing out of his mouth. And the woman liked this. Very much." - Laurie Anderson, Langue d'amour.

Yes, I am stressed out, but it is not exactly because I have more things to knit than time to knit them. Nor exactly because I am rapidly running out of funds and have no work lined up. Nor exactly because I have school deadlines to meet.

It is because of you, you see. You to whom I can say nothing of any of this.

"And the woman did not want to go. Because she was a hothead. Because she was a woman in love."

I look and I look and I look, and I find out something about him that makes it worse, as if he were thumbscrew-designed to seem perfect for me. As if someone had taken all the things I like and never find in men and put them into a package that happens to also appeal to me, and then there I sit, across the table, knitting, and dropping things like a 12-year-old girl.

I have those dreams that I can't wake out of, the ones where I'm all disoriented, where I wake up not remembering how old I am. I might be a child again, in a blue room somewhere in Southern California. At my grandmother's house, perhaps. I think it was blue in there - a dusky blue; the curtains had a trace of metallic foil in them. Blue flowers with metallic foil.

There was a sleeping-bag train. I was the horse - always the horse, in fact, pulling my sister behind me. That is how it was.

Now I am the horse again. Straining against the traces. One of those mustangs that goes bad and refuses the lure of oats and runs off into the wilderness despite years and years of training and formerly good behavior.

Every time I see one of those PBS programs about how you can buy a mustang, a tamed one, or a green-broke one, I think about it. Even now, in the city, I think about it.

And then I think about what I know, firsthand, about wild horses - how they think. How they feel in a herd. It's not the stallion who's in charge, did you know that? It's a mare.

I kissed him. Not the first time it's happened, but this time it was me making the move.

Now I want to fly, far away, to the top of a raw cliff, and sit there, looking out over my terrain. Far enough field of vision to see intruders coming from a long way off. Far enough to get a good big headstart, even in a headwind.