"First we forgot where we planted those bulbs last year, and then we forgot that we planted at all. Then we forgot what plants are altogether, and I blamed you for my freezing and forgetting and the nights were long and cold and scary..."
- Dar Williams, February
I need to pause this little reflections project to say that "February" is one of my all-time favourite songs, and I feel somewhat sad that this line fits so perfectly into my story about Cowboy and his sister, because I really don't think he deserves such beautiful lyrics. I'm not mad at him any more. I'm really quite indifferent. But that's the issue. I was hoping to one day use this song for something with powerful meaning and significance. I suppose I can think a little harder about what Cowboy meant to me. After all, he did cause me to reevaluate what I thought it meant to be in love. That's a pretty big thing. And if things with Cowboy were even slightly different at any time last fall, I probably wouldn't be dating Wrecking Ball right now. So that's important too.
The most important thing to say while explaining my relationship with Cowboy is that he is five years older than me, and at the time that we got together he was really concerned with his future, particularly in a romantic sense. He said that he would be evaluating our relationship at three months, because he didn't want to spend more time than that, at this point in his life, with someone that held no long-term potential for him. By the two-year mark in our relationship, he said, he would have proposed - if it didn't happen before then, he would break things off. Remembering he had that timeline set up, and then applying it to where we would be in the present, is really throwing me off right now. In an alternate universe, I could be engaged right now. I'm not saying that I actually want to be engaged right now. But if we were still together, and he asked me - I know what my answer would have been.
Cowboy made me look at everything differently. It was when I was dating him that I determined my own priorities: education > babies > marriage (I wouldn't mind getting married before having babies. I do like to think that I'll marry the biological father of my children. But I want to have babies while I'm young, and I don't care at what age I get married, so I put babies first). I imagined a future with him, and I liked it. But it's hard to say, looking back, whether I really liked the image of him in my future, or whether I just liked the fact that it was OK for me to imagine our marriage, our home, and our kids. I could let my imagination take me as far into the future as I wanted, and tell him about it, because he was thinking about those things too. We had mock fights about baby names. He brought up the fact that he wanted to get married in a kilt as a throwback to his Scottish heritage (something I wasn't really OK with but I tried to cope with it). The very morning after we started dating, his sister was having morning sickness - awful, wretching, sobbing noises were coming from the bathroom when we woke up - and he said, "don't worry. If we get to the point that you're pregnant - it's not that bad. She's always been a loud puker." I think it's important to note that he didn't say "when you", he said "if we".
Now here I am again though, dating a guy whose younger sister is in the early stages of pregnancy. She was farther along than Sin's sister though. She was showing. And she was my age, not fifteen. When I met her, it made me think about my own future. She was pregnant, happy, and living with her boyfriend and her dog. She was exactly where I dreamed I could be, but couldn't let myself get there. And then she and her boyfriend moved out of the apartment they shared with Cowboy, and I literally never saw her again. This was at the beginning of my relationship with Cowboy. In the early days, I saw her a lot, and we talked about her pregnancy, and I naively imagined myself in the future with a baby on the way, imagined our kids as cousins that were as close as best friends. And then she was gone.
Cowboy and I were just like that. We were tight, and happy, and I was picturing our future together. And then suddenly it was November and I couldn't remember the last time we had had sex or even a conversation, I was lying in his bed trying to fall asleep alone while he played Xbox until 4 am, and I was staring blankly at my bedroom ceiling as he told me over the phone that we should see other people.
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