Cowboy Problems

A love letter to new love

It’s almost February. You roll over to disarm my plans. My left shoulder tingles against the warmth of your delicate face, as my eyes get heavy with sleep and the dreary pull of responsibility- how to be the soul without the body? I dread that I must wake you to a cold and sullen morning, so I watch as you rest your eyes on the soft shell of your subconscious. The whistles of robins tug at the corners of your perfect lips; your smile the harbinger of infinite tenderness.

We are kids, staring at each other, blowing our parents’ money. You kindly drink my milky coffee and eat the food I oversalt. I whisper to you the minutes and the seconds, but we are wont to be late to every party. ‘Let them wonder where we’ve been’, you insist. You grow in honesty as I grapple with impatience. We are certain that the weather will hold.

The trees turn every shade of yellow and green as we ripen at the brush of warm careful breath against ready skin. I hold on to all of it; the giggle in your belly when it’s time to fall asleep, the glass you like to drink orange juice from, and all the times you collapse at the thought of not seeing your family. You save my plants, cook mushrooms the only way that I can eat them, and perfectly burn my birthday cake on the first attempt. I keep a list of buses where you’ve fallen asleep on my shoulder – 315, 109, 159, 417,14… – and all the scenes of our life which I’ll write into a movie. You mention my ‘future partner’, and I ask that you call her by your name. You are ‘it’ and I’m running out of ways to tell you.

So I’ve established that I love you, even at the lowest of your blood sugar drops. We are tethered by a force of cosmic design, and yet our bodies remain subject to the objective impermanence of all the things our hands can hold. That is to say, my love for you, however profound and unconditional, is simply not enough. It has come desperately close, and humbled us both. So I must go fishing for seashells upon the ocean floor, and you must hold me to it. I’ll elaborate.

Last Christmas, as we parted for a month to visit family and hold our elderly cats, you made me promise to go swimming in the sea every day, and then write about it; despite the weather, or myself. Beyond my deep love for the ocean, I had no idea just what it would mean to find myself in it so regularly and diligently. The Cantabrian waters proved unforgivingly cold and rough at first, then increasingly transparent and embracing. I plunged into the mountainous swell at high tide, and dove for shells and fish sightings on calmer days. I wrote about the verticality of my experience – the feelings that emerged from small

discoveries like ‘lazy fish’ – a type of small fish I labelled after their tendency to slide along the sand–, shy minuscule crabs, and see-through sea salps. I began to collect empty oyster shells, as well as those of other mollusks that had likely been eaten by dolphins further out of the bay. My belly was full with salt water and devotion- for the abundance of life, its expression and the tenderness it commanded. I thought of you.

On a particularly choppy day, I brought a friend along for supervision, as there were no lifeguards at the beach during the winter. I put on my diving suit to increase buoyancy, since I wasn’t wearing any extra weights. This of course hindered my ability to dive without having my legs stick out above the water like a duckling. I swam as far as I felt was safe, and poked my head in to scan the area for shells. The visibility was poor due to the mocking push of the current, which perpetuated a sense of impermanence. I felt ridiculed, silly and powerless – but nonetheless determined to find back to a centre peace. I realised, as one does, just how much I’d like to be a cowboy; to sit atop a charging, headstrong animal and command stillness, for both our sakes. To be made of a radical life force which cannot be lost to the weightless scorn of inadequacy.

So, in an act of stubbornness and little regard for safety, I continued to swim parallel to the bay, attempting to discern the faint shapes along the bottom. At last, something caught my eye; the perfect crown of a yellow cockle shell lay buried under overlapping sand dunes. I tried to dive down at once, pulling an impeccable duck dive, but I was too buoyant to reach it. Realising that I was wasting my breath and my limbs were beginning to cramp from the cold water exposure, I hurriedly swam back towards the shore and slid out of my suit, rushing back to my previous position. I dove deep down this time, scanning the seafloor from up-close. Finally, the perfectly lined pattern caught my eye beyond the sand blur, and I swiftly descended to fetch it, struggling slightly before emerging with a perfect honey-coloured striped shell. Sigh. Wasn’t it me who’d charged, with stubborn prowess and direction, against the disappearance of a beautiful thing? Hadn’t I instructed peace despite the sand storms in my belly? Wasn’t I the horse and the current and the body of water, as well as your lover? Still at once, within and without, and ever so slightly numb.

I am alive because the ocean crashed into me. I am yours because I am alive. Devotion means continuing to be the person that you fell in love with, for both our sakes. I have been mocked, too, by a city with impenetrable beauty and laughable air quality. My legs have often stuck out above the water, but you haven’t once pointed out the weakness of my calves. For that I cherish you dearly.

So I want to be a cowboy, and a sailor of course! I long to carve into ancient trees the names of my family, sink my face into new flavours of salt water, stand in the damp silence of perfect mountains, and then come home, make tomato soup, and tell you all about it. Later, over fennel tea and gluten free digestives, I’ll die to know everything that makes your ‘it’. Because devotion is sharing in the creation of an infinite, unconditional life source, where love lies, too, in the distance between our hands and the sand. It’s even in the things that our hands can’t hold – the permanent kind.