greetings from a dreary Monday

There isn't much to tell and maybe I'm also extending my break from blogging because I can. But again, not much to tell. With things spicing up in the world and a completely screwed up switchboard system, my levels of anxiety are on a steady climb. I've gotten a series of about five calls in close to two weeks that have amounted to a lot of brief words before an automated operator hangs up prematurely. In under 10 minutes, with warnings that your talking time is quickly expiring, there isn't much that you can feasibly say, except to make sure you squeeze in an untimely "I love you," because that's what matters most. Even though we have spoken, we haven't really gotten to talk, no e-mails either. The sparse communication is just now starting to wear on me, and the shift from sunny 70 degree days to sleet and rain and resurfacing Winter coats, and my stuffy nose and general feelings of gross. But before Winter stopped in for one last hoorah, everything was pretty swell.

The weather has been beautiful. I spent a good part of this last weekend with the doors open, completely relaxed, tending new sprouts and day dreaming long evenings that will be spent on the porch with my soldier, sipping wine for me, beer for him. Though those days are still a long way from right now, it's pleasant to think of them, to be able to think of them as that much closer.

I almost went through the transplanting process while the sun was out and the days were ripe for potting plants, but this Blackberry Winter was looming on the horizon so I waited for possibilities of frost to subside before chancing my seedlings' exposure to the elements. Just when I had given up on my tomatoes, a tiny sprig of green showed itself, and I awoke this morning to find that my zucchini was busy pushing up through soil all night long. This from-seed business doesn't sit well with my total lack of patience; however, if all goes well, I'll be a veritable produce stand by June or July. I'm still mulling over chickens, although I picked the breed and have glanced over coop designs. I keep coming back to the anchor they would be. Who the hell am I going to hire on to tend chickens if I travel? Am I really ready to be that tied to home? Questions that still need to be reasoned with before I seal the deal.

23 of 31: a brief mid-Monday ramble

I got to talk to The Staff Sergeant last night for an hour an a half - yes, you read it correctly. It had been four days with no word, which is unusual, and unusually difficult given the weighty questions I had been over-analyzing since then. This is one of the downfalls I'm finding to living solo - too much time with oneself. I, for one, can't stand to be with only me for large quantities of time. Digression occurs, festering occurs, worst-case-scenarios devour reason and logic and benefits of doubt. I'm still trying to figure out what will happen in the next year as our lives seem to be teaming with possibilities that do not always feel mutually inclusive [to me]. He settled my mind a little, but as I continue to learn the fickle nature of the Army, I'll believe it all when I see it.

I told him about my "gardening" endeavors and he immediately drew a line from my actions to Michelle's. And I have to say, I don't mind being compared to the First Lady one bit. I love her more and more, from military family support to organic gardening, she pretty much rocks.

And on that note, I'll have to tie things up. This was totally an act of procrastination. I have a proposal due in about an hour and I actually have to take something to class!

2 of 31: giving (in)

What I really meant to say had nothing to do with weather, storms of any genre, except maybe this one back home that has yet to pass [figuratively]. But because I have some dignity, although unapparent to the naked eye, I asked about it there to keep from crying. The bare essence of pride, that that's left, kept me from demanding a verbal shrine, a garrulous flow of all the reasons and ways that you love me, something completely selfish and over-indulgent, concentrated like last season's apple butter or the jar of marshmallow cream for s'mores that arrived a few days ago.

It's more desperate than the boxes can conceive or deliver, right now but not always.

Despite claims of pride, or fraying threads of pride and strength and normalcy, I really meant to free the contents of myself this morning, not that unraveling on the phone would make any one of the circumstances change shape or even appear to. I would still like the luxury of not caring, the freedom of a child to wail full-force, head thrown back, the rest of me limp in surrender just because it is sometimes too much to house this sadness within my body.

Poem for the Telephone

Because I can’t imagine much more than
a continent’s worth of copper,

strand to strand, pole to pole,
supporting crows in the moment

before their brains spasm with
not thought but imperative

to flight, because I don’t know
why I see when I walk

knotted shoes hung
like dead things from

those suspensions of imagined
copper, because everything

beyond the toaster oven
glows with a magic

in my cloddish head,
I imagine our four a.m.

talk pulsing dark
to dark and back again,

and I am in love
with you, yes,

but also the world in which
love is translated

and carried and kept,
even meted out

in minutes, in cents per each
sweep of the clock

hand, I am
in love with this

world and this word
and the ones after it,

the ones said
in the night

when we are so close
no one could

say who spoke first
and who answered

if we slept,
if we spoke at all.

- Paul Guest

you know all the rules by now

I'll preface the following with this character flaw: I can be a little neurotic.  

I missed Thursday's call and then Friday's.  I blogged that already.  

I was crossing the street when I noticed the second one and I thought, though just for a fleeting second, about stopping mid-stride.  To say that I was angry with myself would be an understatement.  Both prompted minor episodes of...[cough]...graceful disappointment but life went on.  I kept the phone close all day Saturday and Sunday but by Sunday night I could no longer stave off the throes of absolute hysterics.  

I struggle with the lack of control that this deployment seems to yield.  Two missed calls back-to-back is one thing.  Worrying that he might think it was intentional is another.  After four days of furious festering, all I could think about was the probability that he had concluded I no longer loved him.  In retrospect I can acknowledge the level of ridicule that this deserves, however in the moment it was reasonable fuel for a kind of discord that unhinged me.  I couldn't tell him that I was punishing myself for the simple error of a silenced phone.  I couldn't tell him that he had done nothing but make this easier for me, that I love him to pieces, that I was sorry.  I couldn't do anything more than watch for a tiny screen to light up, "unknown."

This morning I finally got to talk to him.  My mouth opened and apologies gushed like dammed water released -  

IloveyouandI'msosorryandpleasedon'tthinkIwouldignoreyouonpurpose

[breath]

I don't think I could be too angry to want to hear your voice.  Please don't think I don't love you.

I think he phrased it as, "jumping to extreme conclusions," and I'm pretty sure he said so laughing.  After all he knows me and how I let the cynical committee of judges in my head take over sometimes.  He assured that he never once entertained any one of the crazy things that I had assumed and that he had never questioned how much he is loved.  

After our conversation, I was too relieved to feel as embarrassed as I should have.  He is the Reason and Strength in this couple.  I grip tightly and sink in my heels, all the while hoping for just enough prowess to portray a state of sanity.  

bad karma?

I missed another call.  

I can't even talk about it...

UGH!

I missed my first call this afternoon. I wasn't doing anything worthy of it or too-busy for it. It was a careless mistake; I forgot to turn the ringer back on after driving around with a friend's napping baby. It was less than an hour after he had called that I discovered the notice on the screen of my cell. What a small event it takes to deliver such a crushing blow. I cried. I emailed him. I prayed to my phone god that by technological miracle he would call back (just then), but he didn't. It's late where he is so I'm hoping for the maybe that tomorrow holds.

In an effort to pull myself together, I'll end on a positive note. Baby Girl's mom and I went antique shopping and I got this vintage reprint for my dining room:
And an adorable miniature ice bucket for the bar-in-progress.  It looks something like this one:

my REAL Valentine's gift(s):

I've been meaning to write about Valentine's Day.  The last post featured a little self indulgence, but the real surprise was these gorgeous roses that came on Friday.  He wanted me to get them a day early so I'd have them all day on Saturday and to maintain the element of surprise.  Saturday I got to talk to him for ALMOST AN HOUR!  It was the best 47 minutes in the last two months because it felt like we got to be ourselves.  An even bigger surprise was his nonchalance regarding the ring info I sent. I was absolutely certain that he would 1) panic and 2) never, never bring it up.  He did.  A reenactment is as follows - 

The SS: "I got the latest package - with a sack of potatoes and the jewelry quote."

Me:  "...I'm sorry, what?"

The SS: "I got the jewelry quote.  I thought that kind of thing was supposed to be a surprise."

Me:  "...I'm sorry, what?"

The SS:  "That stuff doesn't freak me out anymore."

Me:  "Oh...yeah...nobigdeal..."

It was one of those moments when the tables suddenly turned, I panicked having been caught completely off guard and I really didn't think that this was an appropriate time for shrieking-with-overwhelming-joy into the phone.  That we'll save for something more official with sparkly deal-sealers and whatnot.  It was a GOOD day!

Then I went shopping.  My way-too-expensive jeans will be ready at the tailor tomorrow.

Now I picture things

He called today and my fingers startled.  I was in class in the midst of a heated discussion of Wordworth's "Prelude."  I was feigning some level of interest with my mind and my hands wrapped around a phone clasped beneath the table, not the epic, not the story.  

It had been five days (which maybe isn't that long considering deployment) but it was long enough to make an anxious woman out of me.  Last week was more challenging than the ones before.  Late at night I ached for him, I still ache for him - just to make faces at me from the other side of the sofa or grab me in the kitchen for an exaggerated dip, the crown of my head nearly brushing the floor, or the word trying to glide from his lips, "sweetheart."  

I've gotten used to feeling nothing, but it isn't me.   Even though I wear it, it feels funny on.  Then on the phone he thanked me for this silly card I sent a month ago, sprayed with my scent and covered in lipstick kisses.  He said that it made his day and despite his delayed gratitude he wanted me to know.  There is so little of us in this condition.  We are maintaining what exists when he's home and so the blips of thoughtfulness have a fracturing effect.  This painful equilibrium crumbles so that I can hear him again in my thoughts.  

He says, "That wet towel on the bed will mildew."   

He says, "Half a jar of Nutella will spoil dinner."

And, "Sweet dreams.  I love you."

Home-sick

I wonder if it's just me that ever feels this kind of weightlessness, like tugging on strings that never pull tight--just small.  Tonight I think that I could jump up and down and shout without acknowledgement from the universe.  And really this is just about realizing how little control I can possibly have at all.  

I'm not sure to what I should attribute this existential panic.  Maybe realizing that he will always leave as long as he does this.  Or perhaps it came when I concluded that the emails I send him don't really get checked, and I can't call and that makes me feel completely...powerless.  It could be a number of other things, really, but those are the likely culprits this time around*.  

Everything here is a little off balance.  I like to think that I've mastered this, that I am exempt from any more rough days and that the short calls I do get are perfectly enough.  When I overlook the telling symptoms that a hard night is coming, I not only feel the initial want for him, but am then also angered for being caught off guard.  This is another one of those nights.  I can be found planted on my sofa in sweats, dwelling on the stories he doesn't get to hear.  Those that he does are abridged or outlined with lost punch lines and a diminishing presence of laughter.  They feel boiled down to hurried transactions, and knowing that he doesn't read the heartfelt emails only adds to my overall sense of impotence.  I am pretty much an ineffective little thread in this great, grand scheme and I hate that.  He can call me, but I cannot reach him even through methods that should.  I am cookies and quickly penned notes with smiley faces, minor and inessential.

-------------------------------------------------------

*this panic surrounding things I cannot control is my usual disposition 

If this were easy, everyone would be doing it.

"...if there's one thing I learned, it's that when our servicemen and women go to war, their families go with them. I saw how they take care of each other, heard how they fill in whenever the system fails and discovered that the trials they faced always were matched by the hope they shared that better days are still ahead." - Michelle Obama

Thank you for being strong enough to hold me up, live your dreams, and keep us safe all at the same time.  My flowers are beautiful and this morning's brief call made my birthday wonderful!  I hope the deluge of care packages adequately convey how much I love you and how proud I am to be waiting for you to come home.  I'd choose this life again and again and again to spend it with you.  See you in dreams tonight - let's meet somewhere warm!

while we wait

It was the same juvenile giddiness that follows that first call to your home line, asking for you - that first taste of what "love" must be like. Remember when you were certain that it was, in whole, the prepubescent boy-child who fancied you enough to chase you down on the playground until you were rosy-cheeked and out of breath?

There I dawdled in the retail lull of early morning, catching up on an order that needed processing, filing some paperwork from the day before. I neatened up my corner of the shop and was grabbing for my keys to retrieve something from my car when my phone began to dance across the glass counter top. I haphazardly reached for it expecting a wrong number [or my mother]. Instead, it was my surfacing soldier two weeks later! Stomach spinning and heart startling into a feverish pulse, I fumbled to find a simple construct of "hello." It's awfully hard to push words through the strain of a grin like that, but I managed to partake in 15 blissful minutes of conversation before his calling beckoned his return.

The strangest phenomenon in this process is the way that perspective is so slyly rearranged. Before him, a quarter of an hour would have been an insufficient pinprick of time. I never would have settled for something so slight to sustain such an unbalanced proportion of time apart. He melts and reconfigures me before I am even aware and I hang happily on those sparse words exchanged in the otherwise barren wait for his return.

As I battled a bought of usual frustration one night, I joked with him that he should have handed over a manual when he finally confessed his profession. I heard his smirk convey through the sound waves of yet another phone call as he explained that he was under the impression I was writing it. In rare moments like today, I feel that I have proven maybe an ounce of compliance to the military life. I feel a hair closer to being malleable in the way that the army needs its wives and girlfriends to be. If we never become able to bend, the nature of this would be crushing. Looking back it seems not that I am writing a definitive how-to, but that I am in some manner, recording my slow and awkward success.

neither kindness, mercy or forgiveness.

"If this is too much for you...," he exhales, but never finishes the thought to which we both know its conclusion.

Maybe this time it is. I can't help feeling awkwardly out of place in the company of his hissed curses and my panicked, flailing arms desperately searching for a rewind button that doesn't exist. I am no longer leaking water, but taking on pools of lead and the stifled sobs within me would rather overtake my person like hungry depths of sea. At maximum capacity my words become lost to reckless breaths, my face is hot and contorted with tears. I know that this pending eruption will poison my soul if I cannot release it so I plead with him to hang up until he concedes.

His exasperation is so palpable that it has taken on a presence in even my room. I imagine his stoic order of ale, a timeless solution to the midnight lover's quarrel. I know him and yet I am bewildered by the means of this transaction, how it came to this intersection and failed to yield. We were whole before we were wreckage...

[we were, right?]

Closing my phone, I place it delicately onto my nightstand, turn away from it and bury myself in all 600 threads. No one else is home and I don't care if I can be heard beyond my walls. For every fairytale that this is not, for every inflated tax paid to distance and time, for every four letter word combination that would never encompass this fury and heartbreak, for every war ever waged, I protest in choking wails.

'cause light strikes a deal with each coming night.

Reason suggested that I wait until we were face to face because our moments of attempted [serious] communication can be understated by a comparison to torture. We don't work it out, we just wear each other down until we're tired and disarmed and I've cried and he's taken the lord's name half a dozen times in that raspy, far away tone.

And in the last text I sent, I "said that I needed time," which he accurately decoded, a little to my dismay. I didn't want to talk to him. Didn't want to read the little digital message about the sun and the good day he hoped I was having. Didn't want to think of his eyes or his smile or his wonder and intelligence. I wanted them gone...like in the cartoon when the wee man with the giant pencil turns it over and begins erasing. I wanted a faintness to descend on the things that would break my heart so that my mental departure would perhaps be less devastating.

In the minute before I desperately wanted him on the phone, I desperately never wanted to hear his voice again. So naturally I called and texted in a manner that only an established girlfriend can get away with. I hated him and loved him and hated and loved myself and hated and loved the warm spring air and hated the heavy-heartedness of night. But I decided that it needed to be now, the dreaded tete-a-tete, because I'm that impulsive. And when his returned call interrupted the voicemail I was leaving on his phone, I threw my trusty maze of madness out the window and gave clarity a go.

He confirmed some fears. I created some. I secured myself close to composure and his boots crunched earth beneath them. He walked and listened. I parked and talked. Then he talked and I listened. Making sure not to venture too far from the mold, he still spat an abbreviated hiss or two and I shed a few silent tears. I hope he understood that I understand a great deal, though I am also overwhelmed with the unfamiliarity of acronyms and objectives. I know that giving himself is hard under the kind of pressure put on him. I also know that "manning-up" is not my style.

He has to go before we can really even begin. He says, "I love you. I really do." and for the first time in weeks, I believe it [the words]. And he's sorry, so sorry that I'm feeling distraught and sorry that it "falls on his end."

[I'm sorry that I'm not stronger. I'm sorry I had to tell you that I'm scared it all might be too much.]

In a voice unexpectedly calm, I tell him, "we just need to figure out how to make it work." And before he again leaves behind the world where I exist and enters the other, he affirms that "we will."

Pause and Proceed

I'm glad to report that I just weathered the most awkward and fumbling group presentation in which I may have ever participated. It was one of the last notoriously school o' business projects I will ever have to do, and for that I am eternally grateful. Having it now in the past will significantly reduce the recent tidal wave of stress I've been churning under.

[hooray!]

My role was to talk about the process of alternative implementation based on a detailed analysis of both a TOWS and SWOT matrix. An unspoken part of the requirement was also to speak with sophisticated use of business jargon, or at lease it was encouraged by certain other team members. So last night, in the midst of those who actually comprehend and care about corporate strategy, I was sure to pick up some intellectual catch-phrases. Several of our suggested alternatives fell beneath the umbrella of "Pause and Proceed with Caution," a formula that is pretty self-explanatory. It is defined as a sort of temporary time-out to regroup, where a company decides to stop promoting some particular aspect of operations just long enough to sit down with a task-force or some other savvy group of expertise to bat around solutions. After choosing some "best remedy," it is implemented and the process continues toward success [or so the company hopes].

I'm not sure that I've taken adequate time to truly bear my deep running hatred for corporate America and thus this stupid degree that I chose after a long and rambling stint of art-ful majors. Starving is not becoming on a princess so I sold out to the man...I did a number of dumb things around that period [we'll cover those another day, perhaps]. That to say that I spend most classroom hours distracting myself with daydreams or untimely gossip or internet surfing or...the list is long, friends. I don't pay attention because I don't care. In the rare occasion that some strategic concept enters and sticks in a pocket of long-term memory, the angels sing and rays of light part clouds to bask me in a celestial glow...or something of that nature.

I've had this pause and proceed with caution idea all over my mind through last night and into today. It seems so simple - acknowledge a potential problem, pause, problem solve, and proceed.

[I haven't clearly unearthed the entire story of inner discourse for several reasons, the largest being that I'm tired of looking at it and thinking about it and fighting it and writing about it. The task of spelling it out would be exhausting and redundant. Also, I know that sometimes [though not often] he takes the time to read a little blog post here and there. Some things are better "discussed" when eyes can connect through interaction, not technology.]

Seven minutes in 8 days is not much - I don't care if you are the Time Keeper, himself. It isn't. It is a long time not to communicate, and I'm tired of pretending that I've undergone some mystical shuffling of perception. X months versus XX months is also a long time. But hey, I am getting the swing of secrecy. Trust no one. Share nothing. We're all a bunch of ghosts, whispers of people...jesus.

I spend four-day blocks praying for my phone to startle me. On the days that it does I am unacquainted with the caller's voice. I know he's tired. I do think of him and how lucky I am to be able to sit down at the end of a long day to gain a moment's peace. I'm proud of him and empathetic to the lengthy lists of reasons I shouldn't think about myself. I AM. On the other hand, I AM also half of US and this us is feeling a little fucking hard to fuse.

We all have our baggage, God knows I've got trunk-fulls of my own worn and tacky luggage. Beyond what we bring to the table, it makes us into the people we are. I am an overly-expressive, needy, over-analytical, neurotic drama-queen. And he is a composition very different from myself. I'm privy to that notion, too, just in case anyone wants to remind me how conditioned/trained he is to be hard and frank and direct and reserved, how different his lifestyle is, how...

I know. I know! I KNOW!

I can't have another empty conversation. Pardon my moment of intense selfishness, but I can't. I can't sit through the unbearably unemotional minutes when I'm about to pull out my own fucking hair. It's my last semester and while it isn't a matter of life or death or national security or war, I just can't feel guilty about being stressed and needing a little love myself. And I hear that this is what the deployment's like. If a prolonged version of this looms on my futures of X or XX months apart...

[Pause.]

No calls. Not for a few days.

Seven [in heaven]

Is enough to say what's necessary, to make me leap from my seat and bound into the rain, to cause re-butterflies, to get through another work-week [if need be], to sturdy Certainty and ban the what-if? madness, to know I miss you.



[Yes, Birthday Girl, you do know me well. I blogged it...[bitch]. Hope it was a good one - your birthday, not the blog!]