My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys - - - Mackenzy Cord

[Roping the Wind]

Love can be a many splendid thing
Has another joy you bring
A dozen roses
Diamond rings
Dreams for sale
And fairy tales

It'll make you hear a symphony
And you'll just want the world to see
But like a drunk that makes you blind
It'll fool you every time

The trouble with love is
It can tear you up inside
Make your heart believe a lie
Gets stronger then your pride
The trouble with love is
It doesn't care how fast you fall
And you can't refuse the call
See you've got no say at all

Now I was just a once a fool it's true
I played the game by all the rules
But now my world's a deeper blue
I'm sadder but I'm wiser too
I swore I'd never love again
I swore my heart would never mend
Said love wasn't worth the pain
But then I hear it call my name

The trouble with love is
It can tear you up inside
Make your heart believe a lie
Gets stronger then your pride
The trouble with love is
It doesn't care how fast you fall
And you can't refuse the call
See you've got no say at all

Every time I turn around
I think I've got it all
My heart keeps callin
And I keep on fallin
Over and over again
This set story always ends the same
Me standin in the pouring rain
It seems no matter what I do
It tears my heart in two


--- Kelly Clarkson

<font color="#996600" size="1">[ December 09, 2004 08:30 PM: Message edited by: incomplete addiction ]</font>

[Roping the Wind]

Journal, so much has happened within the span of last weekend and the forthcoming one that my mind is still reeling in shocked disbelief and pleasant surprise. Oh, God...Gods...I don't even know where to start. The beginning is always a good place, right? First things first, while I'm still trying to get over what I thought was the greatest lost love of my life I had to leave town and get my head cleared. There is just too much drama these days and you would think to laugh when I tell you that my life feels like a soap opera right now. Betrayals, broken hearts, lost loves and long lost brothers come back to 'life.'

Honestly, I just needed some space. I felt like I was about to go crazy. Things at the ranch have been pretty unsettling lately. There is a tension in the air that you could cut with a knife and an underlying current of passive aggressiveness as thick as Mama's old split pea soup. Mandy is angry with me for some unknown reason I think she has some issues she is wrestling with right now and since she had not confided them in me I figure it is none of my concern to ask. She will tell me when and if she is ready.
Seth, well, she has been given the shock of her life when she met my twin brother Frank in a most unconventional manner. But Journal, Holy shit, that is a whole other can of worms that I cannot open up right now as my mind is reeling with all the feelings and emotions clawing at my insides that I thought I had kept concealed so well until now.

Gina's back in my life. She's my best friend.
Has been since I was only fifteen.
But she's...different. No, no...it's not bad exactly, it's just unsettling. You may laugh at me when I tell you this but it feels like it's only been days and not years since we have seen each other last. I cannot believe it has been three years since I had seen her. She was only twenty-three and I twenty-five. It was an ill-fated encounter and we hadn't much time to talk. But we have tried to keep in touch of the years but really, my relationship with her has been as though two ships passing in the night and always destined to miss one another. I feel as though now is our time..here in the now.

And as much as my heart grieves to have lost Shannon I understand now how she must have felt and the conflicting of emotions that must have constricted her heart when trying to decide where she belonged. With me or with Bjorn. I believe in the truth, that everything happens for a reason and while I really was ready to spend the rest of my life with her and give her a boatload of children had she undergone the help with a healer...I see now in hindsight that her breaking off our engagement was probably the kindest thing she has ever done for me. I know that it pained her to break my heart but she could have dragged it on longer and I am glad that she did not. Things would have only gotten even messier. I'm happy for her and the path that she has chosen,
I hope only for the best things for her.

I can safely say that I'm ready to close that chapter of my life but I will always cherish the memories for the very reason that she was one of the great loves of my life. She's my soulmate. But I belive that a person is capable of having more than one soulmate in a lifetime.

I have never been so happy. I have never felt so complete in my life. Gina... she had a difficult time adjusting to the revelation I admitted that I had loved her secretly for some time. Since she came to visit my family (My parents and her parents were best friends)from Italy the year after her sweet sixteenth birthday. I had agreed to kiss her out of the goodness of my heart if she reached the age of womanhood and had still not received that treasured token. I thought nothing of it. She was my best friend. And I loved her accordingly.

But when she showed up with her new boyfriend and looking more breathlessly beautiful than I ever thought it was possible for a woman to look...Gods. I lost my heart that day and I've carried this secret torch for her all these years. Easily hidden on some back burner of my mind but simmering steadily. Perhaps for the day when our paths would cross once again if Fate should be so kind?

She loves me. I can't believe it. Yes, she admitted that she only loved me as a friend but the more time we spent in each other's company the more I kept reassuring her that she's never left my heart...even after all this time. We had a turning point of sorts. Where either of us could have easily walked away or hang on tight and see this unknown path we have chosen to tread through. First friends, now lovers. I do not want to risk what we have had all these years but I want to explore it further and add new dimensions to the journey. She told me she loved me last night. Not as a friend...as a woman loves a man.

I'm watching her sleeping and she's so incredibly amazing I look at her...and I ache. I know what love is all about now even if I did not before.
I had a brief taste...a sampling. But I never imagined I could fall so helplessly as this.
I have never been so happy.

Please God, let it always be like this.
I couldn't handle losing her twice in one lifetime.


<font color="#996600" size="1">[ December 31, 2004 04:18 PM: Message edited by: incomplete addiction ]</font>

[Roping the Wind]

After school
Walking home
Fresh dirt under my fingernails
And I can smell hot asphalt
Cars screech to a halt to let me pass
And I cannot remember
What life was like through photographs
Trying to recreate images life gives us from our past

And sometimes it's a sad song

But I cannot forget
Refuse to regret
So glad I met you
Take my breath away

Make everyday
Worth all of the pain that I have
Gone through
And mama I've been cryin'
Cause things ain't how they used to be

She said the battles almost won
And we're only several miles from the sun

Moving on down my street
I see people I won't ever meet
Think of her, take a breath
Feel the beat in the rhythm of my steps
And sometimes it's a sad song

But I cannot forget
Refuse to regret
So glad I met you
Take my breath away
Make everyday
Worth all of the pain that I have
Gone through

And mama I've been cryin'
Cause things ain't how they used to be
She said the battles almost won
And we're only several miles from the sun

The rhythm of her conversation
The perfection of her creation
The sex she slipped into my coffee
The way she felt when she first saw me
Hate to love and love to hate her
Like a broken record player

Back and forth and here and gone
And on and on and on and on

But I cannot forget
Refuse to regret
So glad I met you
Take my breath away
Make everyday
Worth all of the pain that I have
Gone through

And mama I've been cryin'
Cause things ain't how they used to be
She said the battles almost won
She said the battles almost won
And we're only several miles from the sun



--- Maroon 5

[Roping the Wind]

The previous evening...


"Mac! Stop. Just walk away."

"No, Shannon. It's time I stood up for myself, in what I believe in. People like Bjorn think that they can play God. That they can mess with people's lives without a second's thought.
I won't." Stop he meant. In fact he wasn't retreating. He was advancing.

"If it's a fight you are looking for, I'd advise you. Walk away. It wouldn't be fair. I don't want to hurt you." Or embarass you.

"Hurt me? I've already suffered enough humiliation at your hands, Bjorn. What's one more embarrasment, hmm?" He was seething in rage, trapped in the red haze of fury.

"Stop it, please! Both of you!" This was all becoming too bloody, too real.
Shannon pleaded but it was as though her words fell on deaf ears.

Lion versus Man. You know the old parable. Who do you think emerged the victor? And to the victor go the spoils. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Cowboy was ready to hang up his stetson and ride for that round up in the sky. He had done all that he had set out to do. The brawl was a long time brewing. A tempest in a teapot that could not
be contained any longer.

He died that night at the tavern. His heart stopped for exactly seven minutes. Then he was shocked to life by the angels of mercy on the scene. An onlooker remarked in passing as he watched the EMTs raise the stretcher into the ambulance. "Hate to see anyone dying over a skirt." But sacrificing oneself for the power
of love was an entirely different matter altogether.

The fate of the Cowboy rested in God's hands now.

<font color="#996600" size="1">[ December 28, 2004 05:05 PM: Message edited by: incomplete addiction ]</font>

[Roping the Wind]

She heard the news right after her morning training and nearly forgot the vigorous rub down she usually gave the black charger. After making sure the horse was completely taken care of, she hightailed it into the house and freshened up as good as she could. So she hadn't thrown away all of her feminine clothing. A skirt of cotton blue and a white blouse that were probably completely outdated were thrown on a still dripping body. Shorned locks were left to tumble wildly to her cheeks as she hurried out of the house and into the rental car she had just gotten. She laid on the horn nearly the entire way to the hospital, tires screeching and the trainer slinging a string of curses to anyone who got in her way.

She jumped out of the car as soon as she got it parked and ran into the hospital like a mad woman. "Mackenzy Cord?" Breathless, she barked at the first nurse she came across. Directions were given and woe to the person who tried to slow her down from getting to his room. There had been so much she had wanted to tell him, so much she needed to say, and now she might not get the chance. That thought spurred her on even faster until she was standing just outside his door.
She took a calming breath, and slipped inside with a quietness that was completely not Mandylike at all.

She would be shocked at what her eyes bore witness to once she slipped slowly inside that darkened, coldly sterile hospital room. No, it wasn't supposed to be this way. It wasn't to be the Cowboy in the hospital again after his near fatal automobile accident that had him bedridden for several weeks months into the past.

A respiratory machine breathed for him.
A heart monitor kept up the sluggish beat of his thready pulse. The steady whirr click hiss
of the blood pressure machine the only sounds that permeated the morbid stillness of the air. An air of death it would seem clinged to the alarmingly still figure beneath the thin hospital sheet.

Tubes were crammed into his nose, and IV ran from his left arm, a steady drip-drip of live giving sustance and medication entering his blood stream to help foster his rehabilitation.

His left eye was swollen shut and an angry red.
Mottled bruising colored his bronzed flesh, a patchwork of injuries each seeming to tell a woeful tale all its own. His lower lip was split and encrusted with dried fleck of blood, swollen and at the corner a disturbing shade of purple.
A splint decorated his nose in attempts to rebuild the cartilage that had been shattered. His nose had never been perfect, it wouldn't be
a great detriment to his looks. He had broken it once before as a boy. The near invisible bump on the bridge had been a testament to that imperfection.

He face wasn't recognizable as himself much less human. There was so much swelling and bruising.
A grotesque and heart rending sight for the horse trainer to see and surely would ellicit some form of reaction within her.

Yes, there was much to say. And so little time to say it in. Perhaps he was already living on borrowed time. He had died at the tavern last night. If the medics had not arrived when they had with their shock therapy, who knows? He had lost the will to fight. To survive. Mac wasn't a quitter, he was a fighter. He was stubborn, true. But at least he had gone out like a true hero.
If he did indeed pass from this world it would be without regrets. Life was too short to live with regret.

There was no outward responses to show that he was even among the living. No brain activity the doctor had informed Amanda when he made his rounds to check on his patient. He murmured that perhaps she should contact next of kin. To decide whether they wanted to turn the machines off.
It couldn't be real. It was all some terrible nightmare, right?

So, here she was. Trouble. And surprisingly, she hadn't ended up in the hospital bed.
Side glance view to wristwatch, and she was looking curiously up everytime she heard a door creak open. When the hell would she be able to see him? Quiet. And it had her fidgeting nervously. She couldn't think when it was quiet. She was peering to the glass that offered a window to the cowboy's room, blinds shut close.
That wasn't good. Not good at all. Lips flattened to a straight line, arms entangled tightly beneath breasts, an attempt to keep herself still.


She shrugged out of the denim coat and started hesitantly towards the bed. Blues studied each and every visible inch of him as if to make sure he was still in one piece. The bruises that marred his face had her blood boiling to a dangerous temperature. The doctor's words were heard, but the trainer wouldn't believe them.
Not her Kenzy! She nearly socked the man before he left, but knew that would not be the wisest thing to do as he was one of the people helping the cowboy to stay alive.

Skilled hands clung together so tightly that the knuckles were whiter than the sheets that lay across his prone body. Next of kin? Well that was something that could be done easily as it seemed the Cord family lived in almost every corner of Rhydin. To the bed she went, impervious to the machienes as they hummed the funeral march.

"Well, how many times have I told you that using yer face as a punchin' bag don't never solve anything?"
Yes, she was talking to a man who couldn't hear her, but deep inside, she knew that somewhere, somehow, he could. She stepped up to the side of the bed and took a hold of a hand that wasn't filled with tubes or IV's.

"You'd think you had a death wish or somethin'." Okay so that wasn't the best wording, but she was simply rambling to hide the fact that inside, she was simply dying along with him. Finding a chair nearby, she scooted it with her free hand and settled awkwardly to it's cushioned seat. Icy blues never left his face as she talked, as if hoping to see some glimmer of reaction.

"Well, the horses are doing alright. I've got a possible buyer for the charger, but I think he might need a bit more training before I let him go. Wouldn't be good to sell a horse that throws everyone but his trainer." Her words wavered as tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. What was she going to do if she lost him? What would any of those who had been touched by his charming smile or his guffaw of a laugh do?

With a heavy sigh tumbling through pursed lips, she threw her limber frame into one of the cold, plastic chairs. Everything about this hospital was so uninviting. Chin to chest, as she eyed her boots, musings bringing a deep frown to brows. Anxiety rippled through her figure, apparent in quivering fingers.

Perhaps on some level he could hear her but for all intents and purposes, Pancrazio Mackenzy Cord was dead. His chest moved rhythmically with the assistance of the respiratory machine and there was a steady whirring sound from the blood pressure gauge as it measured the life's force still lingering like the residue of some unfortunate accident at a grisly scene.

He was brain dead and didn't they say the once someone reverted to that vegetable like state that there was slim to none chance of the patient ever recovering? It seemed like a cruel hoax to play on a family that had already suffered severly from the winds of fate and here was yet another shift in the breeze. Change. To every thing there is a season. A time to live and a time to die. A time to laugh and a time cry.
A time to mourn and a time to dance.

He wasn't aware of the woman holding his hand and his fingers were lifeless and held no warmth. That was what would startle her the most if anything. If the sight of his face hadn't done the trick of sending her screaming from the room.

A nurse approached the woman curled within the uncomfortably hard plastic chair and she held a clipboard within her hand. Her voice had a hard edge though her eyes were inexplicably kind.
"I'm sorry only one visitor at a time. And we are only admitting immediate family at this
junction." Maybe Natalie could lie and say she was his sister. It's probably what Amanda had done.

A jerk of head upwards, and she eyed the woman. Plastering on such a sweet smile, she decidedly took the clipboard from the nurse. "I'm his sister." Batted lashes, and she pressed a hand
to cheek before signing her name. "How's he doing?" A calm visage, and soothing tone.

"You will have to discuss that with the doctor. I have no other information to give at this time. If you would, please.." Her brows arched and she had the expression of a woman that had been hard pressed to her wit's end and was on the verge
of losing her already wearing thin patience.
She took back the clipboard and passed Natalie an assessing glance. As though trying to find truth in the woman's admission. Relenting after a keen scrutiny of muddied browns.

"Very well, then. You may visit for ten minutes. But only after his other sister has vacated the premises." Really, how many siblings did this man have?

The nurse was no fool. She realised that at times people bended the rules. But don't ask don't tell, right? She was pushing away briskly down the hallway, the therapeutic soles of her unattractive nurse shoes scuffing along the polished linoleum.

"Huh." Soft mutters in the already too-quiet hallway. Raising herself with a push of palms to the curved chair, she peeped back to the window of his room. Door still shut. Another sigh heaved her chest, and she flopped back down. True, they didn't know each other all that well, but still... she had known him. What would she say? How would she react? She squirmed restlessly.
How bad was it? All this ran through that head of hers.

Surely, the nurse wouldn't be privy to the knowledge of more than one visitor at time in the sick room. After all, the first time around there had been more than several people crowding around the patient during that turbulent time. No one would be the wiser. The door was actually left ajar just a fraction and thin strip of light fell across the dimly lit interior of the room.

Mackenzy was hanging by a moment. And somewhere
a giant clock face ticked down the seconds that still yet remained.


(Taken from live play 12.28.04)

<font color="#996600" size="1">[ December 28, 2004 05:35 PM: Message edited by: incomplete addiction ]</font>

[Roping the Wind]

It is getting better
Or do you feel the same
Will it make it easier on you
Now that you got someone to blame


You say
One love
One life
When it's one need
In the night
It's one love
We get to share it
It leaves you baby
If you don't care for it


Did I disappoint you?
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without


Well it's too late
Tonight
To drag the past out
Into the night
We're one
But we're not the same
We get to carry each other
Carry each other
One


Did I ask too much
More than alot
You gave me nothing
Now it's all I got
We're one
But we're not the same
We hurt each other
Then we do it again


You say
Love is a temple
Love the higher law
Love is a temple
Love the higher law

You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can't be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt


One love
One blood
One life
You got to do what you should


One life
With each other
Sisters
Brothers


One life
But we're not the same
We get to carry each other
Carry each other


One
One

--- U2

[Roping the Wind]

The post to Italy had been mailed several days before the fateful encounter at the tavern and would be arriving (with the postal delay)after the cowboy had been admitted to the hospital.
He struggled on a tenuous thread, walked the fine line between life and death. Either way he was a dead man what did it matter if he gave up the fight? He couldn't go on. Not knowing now his true feelings for Gina. How disappointed she would be.

And yet... he couldn't not go on loving someone else. He would fight to his last breath if it meant that he could hold on to water colored memories of the past. He was no longer comatose.
But he wasn't among the world of the living.
Sightless and gone. He didn't move or speak. Nor rarely did he blink. Trapped in a private hell only he could witness. Oh, but he could think.
And the white noise in the fever pitch of his brain made it all that much easier to draw deeper within himself and shut out the rest of the outside world.

The letter that would reach Gina was a telegram.
Concise and without all fancy pretty speech.
Two words. And but speaking a wealth of meaning.


I'm sorry.


He had been so tormented and confused he had not known what else to write. Therein lay the cold hard facts. He had thought he could do this but he
had jumped the gun, missed the boat on this one.
He couldn't move on.
He couldn't give up.
He wouldn't give up.


In the darkness of his own torturous oblivion only one word remained. And he grasped to it and held tight as though it was all he had left.


Shannon.

He had nothing now. He had lost a great love of his life and was now throwing away quite possibly the best thing that had ever happened to him.
For what, Mac? Hope.


That was all he was living on now.
A wing and a prayer.

<font color="#996600" size="1">[ December 29, 2004 01:45 PM: Message edited by: incomplete addiction ]</font>

[Roping the Wind]

<center>I don?t wanna meet your dad
Don?t wanna hump your sister
Don?t wanna do it to your best friend either
I don?t want you messin around and givin me a blister
And leave me illin for the penicillin

When you walk out I don?t wanna feel left out
Cuz sooner or later its just over, over

I don?t wanna get inside your mind or your pants
I don?t wanna waste my time with love and romance
I want my next-ex-girlfriend,my next-ex girlfriend

I don?t want the fairy tale and
I don?t want the girl from hell
Don't wanna be your biggest mistake
You can be my next-ex-girlfriend,
My next-ex-girlfriend

I don?t wanna learn to dance
Don?t wanna rent the limo
I know your thinking I?m a weirdo
I just want the bragging rights
I want to let the world know
Convince my friends I?m not a homo

When you walk out I don?t wanna feel left out
Cuz sooner or later its just over, over

I don?t wanna get inside your mind or your pants
I don?t wanna waste my time with love and romance
I want my next-ex-girlfriend,my next-ex girlfriend

I don?t want the fairy tale and
I don?t want the girl from hell
Don't wanna be your biggest mistake
You can be my next-ex-girlfriend,
My next-ex-girlfriend

Tell everyone I'm good in the sack
But all your friends were giving you crap
And you just couldn?t put up with that
So no, your never taking me back

I don?t wanna get inside your mind or your pants
I don?t wanna waste my time with love and romance
I want my next-ex-girlfriend,my next-ex-girlfriend

I don?t want the fairy tale and
I don?t want the girl from hell
And I don?t want to spend the time
And I don?t need no valentine
My next-ex-girl friend, my next-ex-girlfriend

Bowling for Soup</center>

[Roping the Wind]

Blues eyes. The scent of roses and vanilla.
So soft skin. He could feel her presence as though her aura had somehow seeped into the very marrow of his bones, had become a part of him in a way he knew he wouldn't soon forget.

Mackenzy was in limbo. Not exactly certain of what was happening to him. He knew he wasn't dying but he knew this wasn't living either.
He was assailed with too many vivid memories. Snapshots of the past that flashed like a moving picture reel through his disoriented brain and the
images so disjointed they gave him a headache as much as he wanted to hold onto each and every one.

He was boy of fifteen again and he was going fishing with his father. He was flinging live bait at his sisters just to hear them scream. And sticking frogs under their sheets, slimey amphibians (with lots of warts)he'd found in the creek near the cabin in the woods where he had spent the majority of his boyhood down on the farm in Texas.

His dark brow furrowed, as he held steadfast to the tenuous thread of reality as though a drowning man would cling to a life preserver.
It was the only outward reaction to the outside world that he was even still hanging on.

He was a youth home from college and celebrating Gina's sixteenth birthday, keeping true to his word to kiss her if she reached such a milestone and hadn't yet received the token. Years fast forwarded. He was suddenly back in Rhydin on that first day in town, new kid on the block and not knowing a single soul in strange and foreign surroundings. He was falling in love. He was slowly dying inside. He was, once again... abandoned and alone.


Blue eyes.


Wetness seeped from behind tightly closed lids to leave a moist trail of saltine against the hollowed out cheekbones, pale beneath the bronzed tan. The nurse was just making her rounds and as she approached the cowboy's bed, gave a startled gasp and her clipboard fell from a grip gone slack to clatter noisily against linoleum.
Fingers pressed towards her mouth as her gaze flew to the EKG machine, unable to believe what she was witnessing. Like a bat out of hell, she was fleeing from the room to flag down the nearest physician on call.

It wasn't a miracle but it was a sign of hope.
The cowboy was slowly on the mend.

<font color="#996600" size="1">[ January 03, 2005 01:43 PM: Message edited by: incomplete addiction ]</font>

[Roping the Wind]

If heaven was an hour, it would be twilight
When the fireflies start their dancin on the lawn
And suppers on the stove and mammas laughin
And everybodys workin day is done

If heaven was a town it would be my town
On a summer day in 1985
And everything I wanted was out there waiting
And everyone I loved was still alive


Don't cry a tear for me now, baby
There comes a time we must all say goodbye
And if thats what heavens made of
You know I ain't afraid to die

If heaven was a pie it would be cherry
Cool and sweet and heavy on your tongue
And just one bite would satisfy your hunger
And there'd always be enough for everyone

If heaven was a train it sure would be a fast one
That could take this weary traveler round the bend
And if heaven was a tear it'd be my last one
And you'd be in my arms again


Don't cry a tear for me now, baby
There comes a time we must all say goodbye
And if that's what heaven's made of
You know I ain't afraid to die


Andy Griggs

<font color="#996600"><font size="1">[ January 05, 2005 05:10 PM: Message edited by: incomplete addiction ]</font></font>

<font color="#996600" size="1">[ January 08, 2005 11:26 PM: Message edited by: incomplete addiction ]</font>