Routine had always been something I had been able to find solace in. Routine leaving me with no time; no opportunity to think.

Topping off the hay feeders, sweeping and scrubbing the horse stalls, riding out into town to the laundromat to pick up a dry batch of clothing, takeout at the cappuccino place or the coffee shop out on the highway, trail rides with regulars at five o'clock, starting on supper—whatever might keep me busy and on the move.

Whichever straws I could desperately grasp and grapple in my hands that might keep me from catching myself standing alone with a tangle of thoughts, in the kitchen without something to do; somewhere to go. Something to keep myself from reflection; something to push back the needle grazing my chest; something to cram the tangled knot of plagued thoughts further into the bottom of my pocket.

Our mornings, for one, were always the same.

The left side of our bed would always be empty during every one of those early foggy mornings when he tended to our horses in the barn, his arms on their bodies warmer than the cold absence of his on mine.

In the lull just minutes before the break of dawn, I would hear the shuffling of our comforter, count the seconds—a breath, and another more heaving—then, the discordant wailing of the creaky floorboards that seemed to voice my own affliction; my own desperation to reach out and grasp at him as he left the room. The floorboards have reached and grabbed and wept at his feet just as I have, never getting through. I would take to keeping my eyelids from opening on their own, stopping them from looking and seeing the absence of his figure next to me. It was more appealing to bask in the warmth of his body heat remnants left in the sheets, playing pretend as if he were looking back at me. Playing pretend as if he were touching me, not the horses' coats, grooming brush in hand.

Oh, but his hands, his hands would work in the barn with a sort of tender care foreign to me, one that I had always hungered for.

My hunger and naïve desire might have been the only part of our routine that hadn't lasted.

For I began to see, in the irritation of skin creasing between his eyebrows; of his eyes narrowing at me; of the tension of his body at my touch, that I have never been quite as good to him as our horses. I understood, I did. My thick hair, less manageable than the mane of a horse. My legs, not nearly as slender as those of a horse. My prickled skin, coarser than the coat of a horse. Me, not anywhere as obedient as a horse, for the mare of which a groom is most proud would not run. Would not try to escape. Would not reflect or think too much. Would be pretty for him. Would stay when told, when reigned back to the reality of life in the stables.

In this reality we have established as a family, I could understood, there had never been room for too much reflection on it. To reflect would be to untangle the thoughts I've kept so neatly knotted away in my shirt pocket, tangled and suffocating, hiding their mess through nothing but the thin fabric of a blouse he has never liked. That he has despised.

Every shroud of doubt or desire for something else—something to make me feel alive, or really, something that is anything else at all—that has ever crawled through my gut and up my throat has been swallowed down and tucked back away with the rest.

Obedient, cooperative, and passive as the best mare, is what I will be.

Maybe, I would acknowledge the passing thought to myself, if I could obey our routine well enough; if I could ignore the needle in my chest for long enough, he might choose my body and not our horses' to wrap his arms around in the mornings.

Only once was our routine broken.

He had come back to the left side of the bed the night after my disobedience with an air of finality and masculine gaiety, hands streaked with the blood of our goat up to his forearms. I, myself, felt the stab wound he had given our goat at the back of my own head, with the contents of my self—my thoughts, my temptations, my impulses, my desires, my independence, my authentic life, every burden making up my brain that he sought to rid me of—spilling out onto the pillow on my side of the bed.

Almost as if one of the sacrificial goats in our copy of the Bible, now sitting on our nightstand watching our every move in bed, I had committed the symbolic act of surrender and devotion to the divine. Surrender of authenticity and devotion to marriage, to the now-reality of my life. Our lives.

To Him. All is done to please the deity that is Him.

What I had stuck to doing, to please him well enough, was pushing back the needle in my chest lightly and inconsequentially—just enough to graze and not puncture me, but never quite enough to pull it out. Tonight, I saw well enough what needed to be done.

In case of stabbing, do not remove the foreign object from the open wound as a measure to prevent blood loss, something I had once heard coming from his computer during one of those evenings. I had been losing blood, I felt it now in the cold tips of my fingers and my feet. My fingers reached with a certainty and finality I had never felt to plunge the needle in its entirety. It had hit much further than it had ever been. I breathed in the sensation for, what would be, the first time in my life.

Not once more would there be room in my body for reflection. Not once more would I weep peeling potatoes for supper. Not once more would I dream of my goat with her barbed-wire barricade, the apple in her mouth as red as his hands that night.

My last full unshaking breath, however, had already been taken long ago.

Routine had been something I had always been able to find comfort in.

Reflection has been nothing but a burden on one’s life meant to be this way, and is only for those who are ready to receive it. To its face I had turned a blind eye. Since that night of renaissance, I have kept my tangled knot of plagued thought sewed shut in my pocket. Thoughts are gone almost as quickly as they came, almost as if they never had been there; never once reaching far enough to graze the needle wedged too deep in my chest. There is nothing anymore that I can see, nor have I wanted to yet.

Maybe all I had been seeing then was the effect of the fog.