My Happily Ever After

This is probably the closest thing I will ever come to writing a fairytale, so I am going to take full advantage of this moment.
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Once upon a time…there was a princess searching for her long lost merman prince. No matter how long she stayed in the water and how much her fingers pruned, she couldn’t find him. Little did she know, she was looking in the entirely wrong place…all she had to do was sit patiently for him to come to her. And that is exactly what happened. He snuck up on her and jumped out of nowhere. Well, trotted really.
*Cue the typical flashback waving and blurring of the movie screen edges*
I was happily planning my dream summer on Martha’s Vineyard when a phone call threw me for a loop. “Lease Axcent.”  Those two words together in once sentence coming from my mother’s mouth just about made me pass out. Was my mom REALLY trying to convince me to lease a new horse? I couldn’t possibly lease a new horse AND go to the Vineyard all in one summer. Could I? Well, I did.
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Like a lot of relationships, Ax and I started out as awkward friends. He would jump and I would look like a sack of potatoes. I would balance my corners and he would trip on flat ground. He was my best friend in a new place where I knew no one. He was my shoulder to cry on and mane to cry into when my parents left me in what I was convinced was my own personal hell (let me tell you, I was the so wrong it’s not even funny). We spent those first days together and fell in love…me with him and him with the peppermints in my pockets. What happened next was a turning point in our relationship. Things escalated…quickly. We slept together. Though let me tell you shavings in your breeches and rubber stall mats are not the most comfortable thing to nap on. In my defense it was a rainy cold day and he was already napping, I just cuddled my way over next to him.
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But of course, at the end of that happy, butterfly in your stomach period, things go downhill. Fast. The Prince and I were at the end of our time together. But someone was watching over me or I just had really good karma that day, because after a few weeks of not knowing what would happen to us, I got my happily ever after.
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I had found my Prince (well, bought really). Even though he isn’t a merman, I think things turned out pretty darn well. My Prince turned out to be a goofy Warmblood from the south that has no clue how big he really is. I had been looking for a prince with no feet, and I ended up finding him with four!

Where do I begin?

Ever since I was a little girl there were three things that I knew I wanted in life. The first was a puppy. The second was to write. The third was to be a mermaid princess. Well, I never got a puppy, instead I got my own personal grumpy cat even before Grumpy Cat was famous. I never wrote unless I had to, I read books instead, because my teacher had told me that I had the best spelling but the worst handwriting ever. And no matter how long I stayed in the water, I could never seem to find my princely merman, though I did find a bunch of clams and a lot of sand in my bathing suits. My Christmas letters to Santa bribing him to “please, please, please, give me a puppy this year” gradually ended, but only because I started wishing for something bigger. A pony.

Since New Hampshire isn’t exactly swarming with mermen or any princes, and I still wrote like a chicken, I resorted to the ponies. I remember the day my best friend in second grade, Sarah, asked me if I wanted to taking horse-back riding lessons together. We were in the heated pool after swim team practice (I was a Blue Dolphin) and she just asked. Now what second grade, animal crazy girl would say no to galloping across fields, hair flying, with her best friend in the whole wide world? Not me! Things get blurry next and I don’t remember what it was like the first time I rode a horse, but it must have been something special because here I am years later

I would like to say that I started writing because my handwriting became impeccable, but lets me truthful here. It didn’t. I hated cursive with a burning passion. It just didn’t make sense. To this day I still don’t understand why the “n” looks like an “m”, the “m” has an extra hump, and “k” looks like an uppercase “R”. Normal print handwriting was too tedious. Who wants to pick up their pencil after every. single. letter. So little lazy me mushed both techniques together. I wouldn’t pick up my pencil to start another letter, instead I just connected my whole word, but I was not about to make my letters have any extra humps or loops. My handwriting came out looking like a bad attempt at really messed up cursive.So when my fingers started itching for a pencil and paper, every story began with “once upon a time there was a princess and her pony…” but that is as far I would get. Who knows where all the princesses and their ponies went off to in the stories written in my head, but I could not get them down on paper in my weird handwriting. I tried to journal, but I felt weird talking to myself. I even tried to keep a riding record, but those just faded out. The amount of notebooks I have that are only full of a few pages of “today I did…” is ridiculous. Eventually, my desire to write was sustained by high school papers and then college essays. And so my wishes of being a writing slid through my fingers.

So what caused me to start a blog? A few inspiring people. The first being my mom. When she took me to get my nose pierced one summer I had such a fascination with it that she jokingly told me to write a blog about my adventures with my nose ring. I considered it (and thankfully never went through with it). When I went to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer she said the same thing, to blog about my summer in paradise. Unfortunately, my computer broke and had to be sent out before I left, so I spent two weeks on the Vineyard without my laptop. Once I got it back I couldn’t just start to blog something that had already begun. So there went that. The next person is actually a blog by a fellow rider, Anna Easton, called Big Eqspectations. I stumbled upon her blog during one of my many sleepless nights on Tumblr. Her blog on her Big Eq goals of Maclay Finals gave me not only riding insiration, but a want to blog something. Anything. Lastly, was a speaker brought to my college to speak to the incoming freshmen, Hannah Brencher. Her speak about the organization she founded, More Love Letters, led me to their website and her own personal blog. After a few hours of reading past posts, my fingers began to itch again.

And now here I am, telling my life to friends, family, and maybe even people I will never met. My posts may not always be significant, or even relevant, but I hope that I can at least give you something to waste time reading. The only things I can promise you are horses, college, and hopefully a sprinkling of inspiration. Welcome to a little slice of the chaos that is inside my head. Welcome to the life of a college girl and her adventures in breeches and boat shoes.