When I met my friend Gemini in June of 1988 at our A level Pony Club testing, we had no way of knowing how our paths would criss and cross over the decades.
We had no idea that we were forging lifelong friendships.
Nor that our friendships would be forged over the intimate knowledge of what it’s like to have your whole world crumble, as you feel the lifeblood and grey matter of your most beloved slip through your fingers … and disappear into a liminal space where once your whole universe shone, as bright and real as the day.
How could we know?
How could we know that our respective destinies would be sealed by the near fatal blow of a young horse’s hoof … or what it would be like to carry the impossible weight of responsibility for it in our hearts?
How could we know the hours we would spend bedside, praying for them to be delivered through the impossible, to survive the un-survivable, and for the love of God and all things holy, TO STAY? To stay for us, who couldn’t bear to let them go!
They HAD to live! We NEEDED them to.
But how could we know what it would take for those two brave and generous souls to comply to our wishes, remain in this timeline, and stay?
We couldn’t, of course.
It would have been easier to pass on to the next life. Truly. And that’s what virtually ALL of the medical experts expected. But they didn’t know Miles and Mike. And they didn’t know Gem and I.
At the time we met, we didn’t know that one would need the other, to be delivered from the slow moving bullet that is guilt, for our inability to prevent the inevitable. Nor that over 25 years after our respective trainwrecks, we would don tiaras and stay up all night telling stories on an ancient porch in the Hockley Hills, sleep under the stars, and find a peace we had hitherto never known. We didn’t know we would feel like twins, despite what a looking glass might say, as each mirrored the effects of the other’s blows to head and heart.
How could we? We were just kids.
When we met, I had a sense of being on my way somewhere else, to be honest. I didn’t know how pivotal our friendship would be.
This was my second time contesting my Pony Club A Level and I was on my way to bigger things.
Mike, Gem, and Geraldine Peace were all contesting it for the first time. They were old friends, who had grown up through pony club.
None of us expected that 7 years later, Geraldine would be in the delivery room to coach me through what our best friend Mike, freshly out of 6 months of intensive neurorehabilitation, couldn’t.
In those seven years, Mike became my best friend. I cried on his shoulder about a long-distance boyfriend I had. I stayed over at his house. He was someone I felt safe with. We celebrated New Years 1989 together and years later, emboldened by alcohol, my best friend finally ventured to kiss me.
And that changed everything. I was going to marry my best friend.
Just weeks before our wedding, newly pregnant, the world by the short and curlies … my whole world was sent spinning by the careless blow of a young horse’s hoof.
6 years later, the blow of another hoof sent Gem’s world crashing down around her, as she, also newly pregnant, lifted the limp body of her 3-and-a-half-year-old son, Miles, and willed him, for the love of all things holy, to live. To live, in spite of what she felt, as one hand slipped into the space the back of his head once occupied, and her world, once solid, liquified.
Listen on, as we pick up the pieces after spending ten days with her family all these years later, and we dream of better ways and better days with horses, and live out our purpose in life.
Thank you, Gem, for showing me an example of what friendship and full-blown authenticity looks like. When you are around, there is only one option, and that is to go ‘Full Paige’. I hope the world is ready for us to bring all THAT, to Horsecraft! ;)
Take a chance,
Paige Lockton
P.S. ANYTHING is possible!
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