Sheep Girl

Junie needs a fucking break from herself.

It all started with the photo of that stupid fucking sheep with its devil eyes staring blankly at me underneath the dreaded banner “A Year Ago Today!” I wasn’t thinking about that sheep, or the mountain it stood on, or the way the rain soaked the air with the smell of geraniums. I wasn’t thinking about any of it. I was thinking about the present actually. I was thinking that I had everything I wanted a year ago. Two years ago. Decades ago, when I was sixteen or twelve or six.

I have it now. And I’m not happy. I am trying, so desperately, to be happy. Why is it so difficult to grin and bear the life you built for yourself? Was I going in the wrong direction all this time? Is it too late to turn around? Can I be seven years old again, holding wet worms in my warm palms? Is any opportunity still wriggling in my hands, blind and searching?

To distract myself, I walk down the block to the liquor store in the haze of a spring rain. The fat drops are crooked and haphazard. My sneakers splash in the sludge of pollen and twigs. Two men are talking at the counter when I walk in, and they stop to stare at me. I wave. They smile with half their mouths. I used to be charismatic! I want to yell. I used to leave my house more! I used to be cool, at some point, somewhere in time, when I was twenty-two and the world was endlessly wide enough for all the versions of me to breathe! You would’ve wanted to buy me a drink! You would’ve begged me to talk to you! You would’ve wanted to fuck me! They don’t give me a second glance. I’m in an oversized sweatshirt and I haven’t washed my hair in three days. If I could guess, I smell like something inside of me has soured.

I head towards the back, where the wine lives in tiny frigid houses. It feels too obvious, too on the nose, but I pick the one with the sheep label, all of them clustered black and white on a pink background. But! If you look hard enough, there’s one, a special one, cloaked in gold. I want to be that sheep. I want to be special and golden and live forever on the side of a bottle of Rose, showing everyone that I’m better than they are.

I check out, slap my credit card on the white tablet. I don’t remember if I paid it off this month. Being an adult is so many hauntings, one right after the other. Did I leave the stove on? How many subscriptions do I have? Am I becoming infertile? Will today be the day that someone launches a nuclear missile? Am I doing enough to prevent Alzheimer’s? What happens if I wake up one day and my hair starts falling out? Will I be ugly one day? What happens when I am old, and no one loves me for my young apple-shaped cheeks? What happens when I’m alone, that last one living?

As I walk home clutching my pink wine, the rain lessens. I see the sun, hazy and shy, at the end of the road. It is cloaked in mist and completely gorgeous and I don’t care at all. How could I care? The world is beautiful and I am lost in it and I can’t stop thinking about that sheep. The fucking sheep. I took a photo of it when it shoved its thick pink nose through the fence. I was in Northern Italy with a man who did not love me, even an ounce. I was in Northern Italy and I cried every day and wished for someone else. I was in Northern Italy and I wanted to be home. I was in Northern Italy and I begged myself to give him up, give this up, the green mountains and the geranium air and the great big sheep. And I did. I gave it up. I got all of the things I begged for: a loving man, a beautiful home, a classic form of stability. I don’t want it back. I just miss it sometimes.

And what do I miss? The sheep’s velvet nose. The open expanse of mountains, the small white dewdrop flowers, the opportunity to feel the word buongiornio in my mouth in the morning, full of so many promising syllables for a good day. I do not miss the man that brought me there, in the slightest. I miss myself, the girl with the apple cheeks, and the ability to spend weeks doing nothing but visiting a sheep. Having no concerns about a credit card, or affording a house, or dying alone.

Of course, I mourned him. I had to leave him, I had to move forward. But I left something of myself behind, on that mountain, in that photo. A version of me that could travel thousands of miles for something uncertain. The version of me that could reach out both hands for the unknown. The version of me that believed happiness was around the corner, waiting for me with a smile.

I sink into the bathtub and I drink my pink wine. I don’t know how to make any choices. I was so confident then, picking A or B or C. I didn’t think about life as stepping stones, or torture, or karma. I thought of it like a big Slip N’ Slide, just coasting along, hitting a few bumps, but still enjoying the ride. Petting sheep through fences. Plucking flowers and putting them in my hair. Believing that life was big and gorgeous and mine for the taking. A girl’s version of the universe, glittered and glowing.

I zoom into the sheep’s devil eye, the black line reflecting something. It’s me, two years ago, and I’m smiling bigger than I have in the past two years. Fucking sheep. I sob until the water gets cold.