The Horse Who Never Left Me

Yesterday morning, something happened that cracked open a part of me I didn’t even realize was still waiting. I was on the phone with my mother, just talking about timing, about how you can’t force the things that are meant for you, about how life has this strange way of circling back when the moment is right, when suddenly, mid-sentence, Jet came rushing in.

Not softly.
Not gently.
But abruptly, with the weight of twenty years behind her.

For years, I’ve brought Jet up here and there in conversation, but the truth is I’ve never stopped thinking about her internally. Not once. She has always been there, just beneath the surface, a quiet ache, a symbolic presence, a part of me I never learned how to name.

And now I can see it clearly: there has always been a reason for the black and white in my life. A reason my ride-or-die dog is black and white. A reason my last two cars have been black and white. A reason I’ve always been drawn to the balance of shadow and light, literally and spiritually. The reason has always been Jet.

So when I asked my mother to tell me the story again, where Jet came from, how she found her, what she remembers, I didn’t think anything significant was about to happen. My mom bought Jet for me when I was nineteen, and even now she’s still trying to piece together the details of that time. But as we talked, something shifted. Jet didn’t just resurface. She appeared with such clarity it stopped me mid-thought.

I heard myself telling my mother not just about the guilt I’ve carried all these years, but how much I still think about that time, how deeply it has stayed with me, and how it’s never really left my heart. I told her that I’ve wished for that opportunity again for so long, not because the timing was right back then, but because something about now feels aligned in a way I can’t logically explain. And that’s when my mother told me something I never knew.

She told me she was the one who found Jet, that she was worried about me back then and hoped a young horse might give me some sense of direction or purpose. But the fear I now feel when I think back on that time is mine, not hers. From nineteen to twenty-one, all my friends were away at college while I was getting pulled into the life of the lost souls left behind, wandering with no path, making decisions that chipped away at who I was. Trying to remember the good moments with Jet while keeping the blinders on to the darker memories of how I felt, what I endured, and what I put myself through is hard. But even with all of that, for some reason, this pull is guiding me anyway. And when my mom mentioned that my stepdad, who has since passed, was part of bringing Jet into my life too, something inside me shifted in a way I can’t ignore

Hearing that broke something open inside me.

I had carried guilt for years, believing my mother had sacrificed so much, and I hadn’t shown up for Jet the way she deserved. But learning the full truth yesterday made everything shift. Jet wasn’t just a horse. She was a lifeline my family built together out of love and worry and hope.

And right there on the phone, twenty years later, the only words I could find were the ones nineteen-year-old me never had the clarity or courage to say: I’m sorry. And I’m grateful.

The grief that followed wasn’t punishment, it was revelation. It was the sudden awareness of how important that horse truly was to me, how deeply she shaped my spirit, how much of myself I lost when I lost her. And it was the clear, unmistakable truth rising in my chest: I would give anything for a second chance.

Before Thrivewell, before sobriety, before the rebuilding of my life, there was a 19-year-old girl who didn’t know who she was. I had dropped out of college. I was drifting. My mother was scared. I didn’t know how to take care of myself, never mind something as powerful and intuitive as a horse. But somehow, Jet and I met each other exactly where we both were.

Groundwork was where we shined, where we were equals, where innocence still lived in both of us, where everything was communicated through energy and body language. And there is one memory that has stayed with me in a way I never fully understood until now.

And before everything shifted, there were the small moments, the ones that revealed who we truly were to each other. I would sprint across the arena, and she would leap into the air behind me, almost playful, as if the sheer joy of matching my movement was enough reason to exist. I would stop dead in my tracks, and she would rear lightly as she halted behind me, hitting the same invisible marker as though we shared one mind. She followed me heart-to-heart, energy-to-energy, without a halter, without pressure, without question. We weren’t rider and horse. We weren’t student and teacher. We were equals, mirrors, two young souls trying to find their place in the world, connected by instinct alone. It was the purest, simplest connection I had ever felt.

One day, I took Jet for a trail walk on my aunt’s property. I don’t remember if I meant to or if it just happened, but Jet and I wandered off the path into a sea of tight, tangled trees. I was leading this barely two-year-old mare, and suddenly we were wedged between trunks and branches with almost no room to move. One wrong step from her behind me could have easily put me in an ambulance.

But she didn’t panic.
She didn’t push.
She didn’t try to force her way out.

Instead, she followed me, step by deliberate step, weaving through every tree exactly as I did. It was like she was breathing with me. Trusting me. Matching me. Choosing me.

When we reached the edge of the woods and the open field exploded into view, I scrambled out first and Jet leapt out right behind and beside me, bursting forward with this wild, dazzling freedom, almost like she was celebrating that we’d made it out together.

That moment has lived in the back of my memory for twenty years. And now I finally see it for what it was: The two of us, navigating a too-tight world, trusting each other in the places where we could not afford to misstep, moving through danger with instinct and connection, and then breaking free into open space, together.

We were partners.
We were mirrors.
We were two souls stepping out of the woods and into possibility.

And maybe that’s why this moment in my life feels so familiar now. Maybe I’m back at the edge of the woods again, and Jet is the thread guiding me out.

By twenty-one, I was living in Worcester without a car, without stability, unable to give her what she needed. My mother and aunt made the only decision that kept Jet safe, they found her a new home. But I never got to say goodbye.

That goodbye froze in time. And something in me froze with it. Selling Jet wasn’t just losing a horse. It was the moment I chose a path that pulled me farther away from her, and farther away from the woman I was meant to become with her by my side. I let go of my intuition, my softness, my direction, and in letting her go, I stepped away from myself too.

There was one other time I felt a pull toward her, I was living in Ireland with my ex-fiancé (a story I’ll unpack someday, but definitely not today). I was around twenty-three to twenty-five, isolated in a way that left me disappearing into some of the darkest corners of my life. And then, out of nowhere, I stumbled on a YouTube video of a horse for sale… and it was Jet. I knew her markings instantly. I was gutted. She and I were now one giant path further apart, not only had I lost track of where she went, but now there was an entire ocean between us. The pain I felt in that moment matched the pain I felt years earlier when I knew she was being moved on and I couldn’t go say goodbye. Those two wounds, the girl who couldn’t reach her then, and the young woman who found her again only to realize she was slipping further away, are pains I can still feel with absolute clarity to this day.

Years later, when everything in my life broke apart and I finally reached for help, I ended up on Cape Cod. Sandwich for treatment. Falmouth for sober living. A horse farm in Sandwich for my get-well job. And now, two decades later, I’m remembering that Jet was originally likely sold to a family down the Cape, possibly Falmouth. I haven't confirmed the town yet, but the synchronicity is unmistakable:

My healing walked the land she once lived on.
My recovery retraced her steps without me knowing.
The geography of her story became the geography of my rebirth.

So when Jet resurfaced, she didn’t feel like the past. She felt like the beginning of something. And maybe it’s no coincidence that all of this surfaced on November 21st, a day marked by a powerful retrograde, the kind that pulls old stories back to the surface, not to haunt us, but to heal us. Mercury is retracing its steps through Scorpio, the sign of buried truth and emotional depth, while Saturn sits heavy in Pisces, urging us to finish what was left unfinished. It’s the kind of cosmic moment that asks us to return to the places where our path splintered, to reclaim the parts of ourselves we abandoned, and to finally bring light to what was frozen in time. And as this pull hit me yesterday, it felt like the universe wasn’t just reminding me of a horse I once loved, it was showing me a timeline opening, a wound ready to close, and a chapter asking to be lived all the way through. You are watching my healing happen in real time, and I am watching it, too.

I don’t know if she’s still here on this earth. I don’t know who has loved her since. I don’t know where this trail will lead. But I know this: I will follow this pull.

With reverence.
With readiness.
With the woman I’ve become over twenty years of losing and finding myself.
With the same trust she once showed me in a forest where the wrong step could have destroyed everything.

If Jet is still out there, and if fate allows our paths to cross again, bringing her home would not just be a moment, it would be a resurrection. A return. A closing of a wound and the opening of a new chapter that has waited half my life to be written.

Wherever this road leads, I’m walking it with grace.

With a full heart,
Kelley