Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

 Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

written by: Tennessee St. Clair

 

“I was waiting on a moment but the moment never came” – The Flaming Lips

 

I don’t know if you have ever fascinated someone so deeply that you fell in love with yourself in their eyes.

I don’t know if you’re supposed to mourn when you no longer see yourself there.

Our exchanges used to evolve into shared chances to reveal each other… this or that thread would be caressed and tugged until it revealed some new fascination.

He could not get enough of me, and in that, I found home.

Now when his story prompts me to pour, when I laugh and start to reminisce, I can see the furrowed eyes of a man whose story is interrupted, and it’s fine… I don’t mind. He deserves an audience, and he should always have one. As a papered crazy, I understand as well as anyone the value of a witness, if only so we can look up for the occasional shared “did that just happen?”

It’s just that… it’s just that I also came to quite like fascinating. It was wonderful to be a muse, and now I am a muse to these men and their imaginations, and it confuses me because he is right here…and I cannot remember the last time I saw him see me. He looks at me plenty. He grabs my ass. He lets me know I turn him on. I want to know that he sees what I see. I want to know that he also understands, or how many chickens he thinks is an appropriate start, or where we should park the RV first… because in all this time, it started to look a lot like we had different dreams… I miss the way my words used to be new music every time, and I’m starting to hate my greatest hits.

I know he loves me, but sometimes… he feels himself love me and that is enough. He forgets that I am still in here wishing someone had wanted to hear what it was I was thinking before he got back to what he was saying. He forgets that a lot of this left me with questions, and I’ve told him I need answers, and he says he knows and I’m here telling you.

I’m Sylvia-Plath-of-Stardew-Alley here, and he’s on the sofa talking to his Xbox game in an ensemble of character voices and accents, and I love that… I love that he is a show. With my body and my image carrying a lot of heavy responsibility, it can be hard for me how much time I spend wishing I had a fluffer… but I am trying to recognize my own codependent tendencies.

I’ve intellectualized most of my woes away with mantras about institutionalization and broken binaries. I’ve told myself that he is a domestic… that I have a house husband… but then I catch myself slowly morphing into something midcentury-modern that wants to know why I’m taking the garbage out, too? When I hear my own inner John Wayne, not his abusive boys-don’t-cry asshole, but the facade I came to know… “stop right there, little lady,” I understand my wiring has been failing us both too. I love him too much to resent it, or I could walk away any minute… it really just depends on the day.

As I near my 43rd birthday and stop to smoke where the roads diverge in the woods, I recognize that I am in a relationship that may have exploited me beyond my own ability to measure. Intrusive thoughts went largely unsupervised, and the last three years have aged me in ways that I am simultaneously grateful for and terrified by. Heroes and ideals that I assigned great meaning to have fallen away to stark recognition of real-life limitation, interpersonal and otherwise.

We are so the same, but with our fingerprint blends of trauma and trial and our models for love and attachment styles and acronyms that explain our errors and promise ways to be better at society even though we are in the theater watching society fail… I can so easily sink to the bottom.

It’s easy to get caught in your own mythology. It’s easy to go to dark places, especially when that’s what you know. I didn’t mean to be a shadow creature. I’m pretty fearless when it comes to me. I’ve cared so much about earning this thing…

I grew up wrong for this. I grew up with too many chants about what this kind of behavior would say about me.

Is it time for a boyfriend?