Nobody ever told me that it wasn’t my fault.

That is to say, everybody did, of course. But I didn’t listen, I didn’t believe. My young egotism blinded me.

I couldn’t see that it wasn’t all my own failings that caused the breach. That his small passive actions actually mattered, no matter how subtly crafted, no matter how carefully wrapped in woolly innocence.

He held inaction like a knife, cold and dispassionate, showing me in no uncertain terms who had control, power, and dominion over how our life would proceed. Or, in the case of Mark and I, how our life would not proceed.

He’d called a grand halt. Silently, though. Without letting me know.

I was still harnessed to the sled, pulling and sweating, panting and struggling. And wondering why the hell the load was so goddamned heavy.

But still, I felt certain that if I just needed to keep barking, pulling, wagging my little bitches tail to show I was a team player. Sure that if I could just learn the right technique I could keep that sled moving forward, through the deepening snow, toward the home I thought we were both aiming for.

He’d laid down, stationary, without me knowing or understanding the game. I thought he needed a prod, a nip at his flank, a little reminder that we were pulling a fucking sled together, and I was just a twenty-something girl, uncertain about how to pull a sled, be an adult, build a life. He was the one who was 40, so presumably knew how adventurous lives were meant to be lived, having lived half a life longer than I.

I pulled SO hard. And all the while he laid down, using his solid 6’-2” frame as dead weight. Singing me a symphony of soundless NOs that I wouldn’t hear, couldn’t conceive of, until I was all wrung out. Until I couldn’t pull any longer against that weight.

When I stopped, when I climbed out of the harness, I could hardly believe my own lightness. My body was buzzing, I wanted to dance, to run, to scream, to live in the world again. I was full to the brim with movement, light again, on my toes.

12 years later and I’m only now really seeing how I painted that failure as my own, and held it, precious, to me. I couldn’t make the sled go, with that grown man who had six inches, sixty pounds, a Stanford engineering degree and a dozen years of life experience on me digging his feet in to impede any forward movement.

I thought, when I walked away, it was a weakness on MY part.

Egotism kept me so blind. The idea that I’m the centre of the whole fucking show, and that all the rain that falls, the wind that blows, and the snow frosted my hair was coming down upon my head because of my specific qualities, or lack of qualities.