Packed

Tomorrow, I head off to Terminal 5 at Heathrow for my flight to the US. I have packed my suitcase with determined efficiency, using a new packing technique (new to me, at least), and I have crammed in a huge amount of stuff into one suitcase and one cabin bag.


Sadly, there wasn't really enough space for this monster. She tried.

It is at about this point, when the trip looks very real and inevitable, that I get some nerves. I look at my packed bags and feel certain that I am forgetting something utterly vital and irreplaceable.

I also have to tidy up my bedroom before I leave. Something about coming home to a chaotic room is very unsavoury to me. I'll have to hoover and put everything away before going to bed tonight, and in the morning I will probably change my bed sheets so that when I get back, a month from now, everything will be ready.

A fair amount hinges on this trip. Life could be extremely different in just a few short weeks.

Insomnia

My peace of mind is less than peaceful just now. I have been out for walks in the surrounding countryside in a bid to find some peace and quiet.



What is it about being out in the air? It is pouring with rain at the moment, and I am seriously considering donning my coat and boots and trudging out into it. Last night, I set my alarm early, with every intention of squeezing myself into my running lycra and getting out early to stretch out and put some cold air in my lungs.


The run was thwarted by an abysmal night's sleep. I tried some of those herbal tablets that smell and taste like shit, hoping that they would let me get to sleep at a reasonable hour and stay asleep. They didn't work. Well, they worked enough to make me drowsy and floppy - so floppy that I was slightly concerned my hips would dislocate if I lay on my side - but I was still wide awake.

Cowboy messaged some time after 1am, and we talked on the phone for a little while. It made me miss him all the more. The PVP is bad. My dreams when I did eventually get to sleep were threatening and stressful. I woke up remembering why I don't like taking those pills - they dredge up some very disturbing dreams.

This morning, I lay in bed for several hours before I could bring myself to get up. I did some yoga to stretch out and get oxygenated, which was helpful. I often feel I should make it more of a ritual.

I know it's getting bad when my thoughts don't even make sense to myself. It's time to get out of here...

Learning how not to be deluded

Despite my previous attempt to be rational and calm and not bite Cowboy's head off the other day - which I deemed to be successful - I followed that success with an epic fail of temperament.

Psychosis is brewing

He messaged to say good morning. Said he loved me. I asked him about plans for the horse expo which we'll be going to while I'm visiting next month. He said he didn't mind.

Something in my brain flipped.

It doesn't matter he had said. I blew it as far out of proportion as I could. I huffed and puffed and typed a ridiculous message back to him, to the effect of: If you can't say more than three words about anything, I'm going to assume you don't care about anything.

He was baffled. He asked me to call him, trying to make the effort that I had courteously requested the previous day, ready to talk to me. This is a visual representation of what he got from me down the phone:

I ranted, raved, accused; I was furious and defensive; I was entirely out of patience. Clearly, I was still bothered about our communication failure. I should not be so deluded about my psychological progress with issues that I think a simple two message exchange will remove an entire chunk of rage from my psyche.

He listened patiently. He asked what he had to do to make things right.

He is so very tolerant of me sometimes.

Learning how not to over-think things

I am a chronic over-thinker. People I don't even know tell me I'm over-thinking things (see my experience with a crash mat and a fake horse at the Centre of Horseback Combat).

I over-think what to wear in the morning. I over-think what people in the village would think if they saw me running (flailing) through the village in an attempt to get fitter. I over-think what people say. I over-think what people don't say.

Since he left the UK and went home, Cowboy and I have slipped out of one of our old routines. Before, we would always message good morning and good night, every day. Didn't matter what I was doing, the last thing I'd do at night would be to reach over, get my phone and type him a message: "Good night. Love you. xxx"

When he would send me a message some time in the afternoon saying "Good morning. Hope you have a beautiful day!" it would make me smile, and make me feel a warm sense of appreciation for him. It was as if he reached out through the phone and hugged me (this has an advantage over a real hug, in that he cannot tickle me this way).

We fell out of this habit recently. Maybe neither of us got back into the old routines this time. Life is a bit weird just now. Still, I found myself reading more and more into it. I decided he didn't want to message me any longer. I decided that he didn't say good morning any longer because he didn't care if I had a beautiful day or not. I started to purposely not message him, to see if he did care. I started to rehearse the fight we could have about how he doesn't care and never messages me, how he doesn't make any effort.

Coupled with my PVP about my upcoming trip out there, I was becoming irrational and aggressive.

Then I started to panic, and realised I needed to address this before I over-thought it into a serious issue in our relationship. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to explain exactly how I felt: angry, frustrated, neglected. I planned to call him and give him an earful.

Luckily, I wimped out. I took a deep breath, and decided to message him, and be as calm and rational as possible. Here's how the conversation went:

And just like that, all of the stress went *pooff* and vanished. I felt very silly indeed.

And, breathe

He made it. Despite a late take-off from Seattle and my paranoia that he would miss his connecting flight, Cowboy is here. Whilst he was chirpy enough when I picked him up from the airport at around 10am this morning, he has crashed this afternoon and is sleeping off the journey while the cup of tea I made for him goes cold beside the bed.


Over the last few days, I've harboured some tension that I have now been able to release. The PVP was excessive. I worried that travel disruption would steal some of the time we have together over the holidays. I worried that his feelings might have changed. I worried that my feelings might have changed. I worried that Christmas would become an awkward festival of realising I'd made a huge mistake, a catalogue of huge mistakes.

And then he walked through the doors of International Arrivals at the airport, his guitar on his back, and he smiled at me and kissed me and hugged me tightly, and I forgot all about my absurd worries.

I love him.

Worlds apart

It's getting close to the time when Cowboy will be arriving in the UK for Christmas, so naturally there's a bit of PVP starting to kick in. I am restless and irritable, and scrabbling about for ways to make the days go quicker. It's harder to do that without uni or a job to take up the bulk of my time.

If I had my head in a sensible place, I'd be working on the businesses (mine, and Cowboy's) behind the scenes: adjusting websites, planning updates, drafting letters etc. My head being in an insensible place, I tend to drink a lot of tea and faff about.

Yesterday I joined one of my oldest friends for her birthday celebrations. I drove from the Oxfordshire countryside back to Tooting (where I could park for free as I still have my resident's permit), hopped on a bus to Clapham and wandered down Northcote Road. It was cold, but not bitter. I didn't wear gloves or a hat and I was fine.

We went to the pottery painting cafe and had tea and cake while we dabbed paint on to the various pieces of crockery on offer. I had to resist the teapot with a capacity of an entire gallon. I went for a more demure one pint mug.



The mug features a rope around the bottom, three emblems of London (pictured), a black and white cow (inaccurate, because Cowboy doesn't work with dairy cows, he works with beef cows, which are usually black Angus), a yellow horse (Sunshine) and a blue dog (Blue Dog).

I've never been artistically accomplished, and I'm hoping Cowboy will like it for the sentimental value and its generous tea capacity.

After our pottery escapades, we had a lovely dinner at The Breakfast Club (pie and mash, a side of mac and cheese, banoffee pie), and some drinks in the bar next door. On the way back to Tooting, I went past lovely shops and restaurants, and I wondered why I had left London. I drove back to the Oxfordshire countryside.

Cowboy messaged me from Montana, where he is taking some time out to see his family before he comes over here. All it said was: It hit -40 this morning.

That's in Fahrenheit, but it happens to be exactly the same temperature in Celsius. Minus forty. Minus forty degrees. What alien ice planet is he on?? Hoth?

The only suitable response I could come up with was: No thanks. No minus forty for me. In his little hometown I expect the wind is whipping across the prairie, and there aren't hundreds of lovely shops and restaurants to take refuge in.

I realise I have never been to the US when it's been cold. It worries me more than a little. I will need to invest in a space suit. I mean, in a really good coat.

Pre-Visit Psychosis (PVP)

Just a few short days now stand between me and Cowboy. I've entered the phase which I like to call "the pre-visit psychosis" which means I can't remember anything, I do a great deal of faffing about, and I generally cease to function well.

I spent yesterday in the kitchen, using up all of my vegetables in soup. One of my creations was the fabulous Beetroot Haters' Soup which smelled and tasted quite divine. If I hadn't been suffering from pre-visit psychosis (PVP) I'd have taken a picture or two.

Today I need to finish a project that I started a few weeks ago, which seemed like such a good idea at the time.



Cowboy and I will have been together for a whole year when I go out there on Monday, which certainly defies my expectations. To mark our anniversary, I'm putting together a scrapbook of pictures from my trip when we met, and what we've been up to over the year. This is partly for my benefit too, as I don't want to forget how we came to be together when it's such a ridiculous story.

I have a few pages left to do, but with PVP they've become quite difficult. I only have a couple of days left to fill the remaining space in the book. It's been a lovely experience to sit and take time to look back at my photos, think back to our earliest conversations and interactions, and remember all over again why I fell so hard for him.

We had a curious coincidence of thoughts last night. I dreamt that he had turned up in England and surprised me. When I told him about it this morning, he paused and then said "That's weird. I actually thought a little while ago about what it would be like if I just showed up in England and surprised you. I imagined doing it."

More likely, we've both got seeing each other on the brain and it's inevitable that we think the same things at around the same time.

I'm pretty excited. One of the strangest things I'm excited about is seeing Cowboy's dog, Blue Dog.



I'm firmly a cat person. Or I used to be firmly a cat person. These days I'm not so sure. I made friends with a stranger's pitbull on the tube the other day, and played with my brother's dog while nobody was looking last weekend. I have an overwhelming urge to shove my face in Blue Dog's stinky, grubby fur and give him a big hug. He hasn't had a bath in goodness only knows how long. I can only blame the PVP. No rational person would want to go within three feet of him.

Apart from how he is blindly adoring and obedient (mostly), and just loves attention. He gets a whole double page spread in the scrapbook.