The Ballad of Jack and Rose

I am quite shattered, paranoid, worried. My boyfriend told me today that he thinks the way Floppy is being brought up bothers him. For instance, that I take her with me to bed. He says he is a light sleeper (he is) and he'd never be able to sleep with her in the bed, and what'd happen when there's a kid. Now, Floppy doesn't jump around in bed once we've lain down to sleep. She stays quietly beside me in the morning until I awaken even if she's woken up herself. My boyfriend doesn't know that. But I think he doesn't want to share a bed with her anyway. I didn't know this. And I am very shocked and worried about how strongly he feels about it, how determined he is about it. I feel like I appear to be someone I know, a woman who wants to have a child even though her marriage is falling apart, because she won't be able to conceive later because of gynaecological problems: a crazy, manic woman. A colleague had recently told me he thought me crazy for attaching so much importance to animals, for thinking more of them than human beings.
I thought my boyfriend understood, I thought he knew. I am too tired to fight over this, over anything after so many years. I wish, well, I wish sometimes, now, that if this is how we are going to be - he said, with great concern, that our relationship might even end over this after we marry - I wish I could go my way, that I would not have to share my life with him.
Floppy is the dearest thing to me, one of the very dearest. She gives me love in a way few do, and I don't want to put any distance between us. I don't think I am crazy and I thought he felt the same way. But he doesn't, and I feel too old to fight.

I watched The Ballad of Jack and Rose today, and it's stayed with me through the day. And I wish, I so wish - to be loved like that, that state of innocence, and that things could always be that way. I know it can't, I don't think I even want to go through the physical living out of it, it was bad enough how dependent I was on baba and how claustrophobic it was. But this world - where you never find one whose soul is like yours and who understands you and there are no compromises to be made - I wish I didn't have to deal with it, I wish I could turn away and live like Indrani, with all my animals and their unquestioned love. And die with them.

And no, I don't want to have a kid. And I don't want to guard the marital home in one city for the rest of my life after I marry. I can't stay in one place, I am sorry. Hard as it is to stay alone, I can't live by another's rules in their house. I don't want to, I can't, I am sorry, I am sorry.