I'm sensing a theme

Just to hold your hand

I woke up last Tuesday with a strange urge to go outside and graze. At first I was scared by this impulse, what kind of person wants to go outside and eat grass? But then as I groggily rolled out of my bed my first waking thought made a little more sense… Instead of the correct soft smack of flesh upon tile my feet made two dull clops against the ceramic. To call them feet would also be incorrect, as the kind farrier that came later to give me shoes informed me, "From now on, they's called hoaves boy... Aw don' cry, it ain't so bad." I wasn’t some sort of horse lover before, we’re city folk, the closest that I’d ever been to a horse was watching the police ride them during parades. But after getting over the shock of having a horse for a son, my mother sensibly went down the library and learned all she could about grooming and hoof care. Some part of me thinks that she expected it, when I announced that I wanted breakfast with a loud neigh (it took me a while to figure out how to talk properly, I still have trouble with “s”) she only did one double take and asked me what horses eat for breakfast. A little too cool if you ask me, but it was a relief just the same. The newspapers weren’t as kind; the reporters tied my being on the track team with inflammatory reports of high school kids taking horse steroids to be better at sports… But a quick look at my less than stellar record at meets rendered that speculation moot. Scrutiny of my ancestors revealed no previous transformations into animals and a doctor testified before congress that I was neither contagious nor an ingenious magician… So after the media hype died down I was sent to the same place every 15 year old is sent, high school. The kids were mean at first, I'd never been popular before but now only my friend Russell would sit with me at lunch; then two days later I demolished our rivals in the tri-county cross country meet by finishing the course in half the time that it took all the other runners and people started to warm up to me. I even got a girlfriend; I’d gallop to her house every morning and she’d ride on my back to school. I loved the way she’d tousle my mane when I did something funny, or hold on tightly as a raced alongside the bus showing off. One could say that my life hasn’t been better… But sometimes I stand awake at night wishing that I could just hold her hand.

Forget about your house of cards
And I’ll do mine
Fall off the table and get swept under

I'm delirious from lack of caffeine