"Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me."-Emily Dickenson.

There was a horse on the lawn. When she saw it, she was sure it was the product of her imagination. A hallucination, a product of an overworked mind and too little sleep. She even picked up the cup she had been drinking from and took a sniff, perhaps to check to see if some unseeing Being had turned her water into wine and so intoxicated her. For only drunkenness could explain the sudden appearance of the horse, or was she perhaps going mad? Such a thing was something she had joked about on many occasions, but perhaps it was true.

While in a silent debate on whether or not she was finally losing her grip on sanity, the horse simply stood there on the grass, peeking through the window and silently beckoning for her to come outside.

Then a new thought came to her. Perhaps the horse was real. If it were, well then, the most likely explanation for its presence was that it had escaped from some nearby livestock barn. Perhaps some careless worker had left a door open and the horse got out. Maybe several horses had and this one just happened to end up here. Any moment now, someone was sure to come for the horse and would return it to whatever place it had come from. She waited, but no such person came and still the horse stood, silently beckoning with its dark eyes.

At last her curiosity won out over common sense. She went outside. The horse whickered softly as if to say, "It's about time."

Upon close inspection, she found him, for the horse was a stallion, quite beautiful. Breathtakingly so in fact. His coat was flawless white and gleamed with a pearly iridescence in the faint moonlight just before dawn. His eyes weren't black as she had originally thought, but a deep, warm brown. They shone with kindness and intelligence.

When she came outside, she wasn't really sure what she had in mind to do once she got there. The horse answered her question for her. He knelt and allowed her to climb upon his back.

Without question, without stopping to think of reason, she mounted and allowed the horse to carry her to wherever he thought was best.

There was no fixed destination in her mind, at least not in her waking mind. If there was one, it was in that deep heart of memory where the waking mind dares not to go. It dares not because it knows that such paths are dangerous and fraught with pain. So only the sleeping mind goes there, where there is no need to fear the pain, and no shame in the scalding tears that are hidden by the kind, dark cloak of night.

Such places are not spoken of. Perhaps it is because we feel unworthy of them. That we, mere humans feel that such places of splendor are only fit for those divine beings without flaw or sin and not for such as we who have known sin, and pain, and suffering. We who are flawed, who possess souls like so much broken crockery.

But in this moment, she did not question her worthiness, only wrapped her arms around the horse's neck and felt his warm sides as they rode through the night. Dylan Thomas warned us to "do not go gentle into that good night," and neither of them did. The horse went snorting and she went whooping. Both of them very much alive and not at all keen to go gentle anywhere.

Where they stopped, only they know, but perhaps somewhere along the way they picked up another rider before making their way to the vast and endless sea.

"I looked and saw a pale horse, and upon him was a pale rider. The name of the rider was death."-Revelations