I am 23 and still drawing horses, trying to perfect the angles of their bent legs as they run wildly— wildly yet deliberately.

When I drive my mom home from the city and past a ranch, she asks me when I'm going back to school, what will my major be. I'm going seventy miles per hour and speeding through lights, imagining myself running instead like in my drawings, fast and frightened but free, the sound of my feet hitting the ground.

The next light turns red and I hit the breaks, feeling her skinny, bone-y fingers dig into the muscle of my bicep like needles. I tell her, "Soon," but the word alone gives me a cancer that gnaws on the muscles of where she holds me.

I am 23 and when I dream, I read books with no commas or periods, no ends to their stories. Words turn into strokes, pages into frames and the frames into mares. I wonder when I wake up, if I were to make the jump, would I make it? Or would my legs get caught on the pole? Worse, would they break when I land?

Horses are delicate, no matter how intimidating they may seem. show horses bang their heads into doors, wild ones run into trains. Some are quieter in their deaths— some just lay down and never get back up.

I am 23 and scared, yes, still. Scared because despite my age, I feel as if I'm fresh out of my mother's velvet womb, legs shaking and barely able to support my own weight but I cannot stay still. Not in a 9-5 job or in my tiny, subpar apartment. Not at my valedictorian sister's graduation dinner.

But I'm more frightened that my constant movement will scare off my loved ones. I'm sorry— I can't help that I buck.

I'm 23 and I draw horses on my credit card statements as the fan whirs violently above my head. I imagine it falling down on my body, heavy enough to crush me and maybe then, only then, will all this tension leave my body. I would be content to finally stay still, to lay down now, if it meant I could die.

I believe in God the way a baby experiences object permanence; fleetingly, when I see the sunlight trickle in through trees and when my car's engine doesn't knock when I start it.

God, can you hear me? I can be your show horse. I can make the leap if you promise me a place to land.

I'm 24 and all I've ever wanted is a promise— that's all I've ever needed to be tamed. But until then I'm drawing horses, and I will forever if I must, until my fingers can no longer hold up the pen.