Chosen by a Horse by Susan Richards

few weeks. After that, it felt like coming out of a coma and realizing all the ways I’d been left behind during the ten years I’d been in a vegetative state. The void in my life created by not drinking was larger than anything I’d ever experienced. If I didn’t drink, what was the point? What did I
do?
    I missed drinking but I didn’t miss the hangovers. For the first time in my adult life I had mornings, a whole chunk of day I’d never known about before. I’d perceived them hazily, when I could perceive them at all, as something to survive, something to get through. Now I really had them. I could get up and eat breakfast. I could ride Georgia first thing, before the bugs got bad. I could canter around in the woods near the new house I had bought after I left Jerry.
    It was a miracle, having mornings. I couldn’t get over how beautiful they were. It was like being at summer camp again with a feeling of excitement each dawn because theday ahead was going to be full of horses and sweet-smelling air. And no one was going to hit me because I finally lived alone. It was the first house that was all mine, where no one could tell me to get out or make me feel unwelcome. I had bought it a month after I stopped drinking. So mornings were good. They were really, really good.
    Nights, on the other hand, were awful. Dinner parties were something to survive, especially if liquor was served. Blind dates (or any situation that smacked of a fix-up by well-meaning new friends) were out of the question. Without liquor I couldn’t function socially. I couldn’t make small talk or flirt or laugh. I felt like a child trapped at the grown-ups’ table. Conversation around me sparkled with talk about terrific jobs, fabulous children, trips abroad. I was the retired Gallo expert who stared in amazement at the wineglasses people left half empty when they got up to leave the table.
Hey
, I wanted to say,
how can you leave that?
I got quieter and quieter and eventually I stopped going to parties at all. I spent my days and nights alone.
    With all that peace and quiet I had plenty of time to think, and what I thought about was beginning that novel I’d been wanting to write ever since I was seven. It was the other thing I loved besides horses: books. I loved reading them, and I couldn’t imagine anything better than growing up and writing one. When I became a teacher, it was always in the back of my mind to use summers and school vacations as a time to write. I wrote poetry, kept a journal, and briefly freelanced as a feature writer for a small Bostonpaper, but in spite of all this, I’d never gotten serious about writing.
    I needed to support myself, and the chances of making a living as a novelist were slim. After burning through my inheritance on expensive appliances (no longer mine), a house, and a horse, I needed a job. I had liked teaching but I always found myself wondering why smart students failed or why some students hated school or smoked at twelve or rebelled in other ways. I wondered about the other teachers, too: why they said what they said and did what they did. I wondered about people all the time, mostly about the unhappy ones. There seemed to be so many, including me. Mornings were lucid, and my days were peaceful and calm, but I couldn’t say I ever felt happy. I felt grateful sometimes, not happy. There was a difference. I was relieved but not energized.
    Therefore, while working in the office of a local alcohol treatment center, I returned to night school for a master’s degree in social work. By my midthirties, I was counseling in a residential drug-treatment program during the day and teaching social work classes at the local community college at night.
    I felt as turned around as Eliza Dolittle. There seemed to be no connection between my former life and my new life, except for horses. Horses were the thread that had been there from the beginning, through the pain of childhood and the drinking and the marriage,