a dream is a wish your heart makes

She stands to my right and I imagine her name to be something more usual than mine. If we had anything else in common it would be too much for me to remain composed. I am at the airport at an inopportune time waiting for my friend whose soldier also isn't coming home tonight. Everyone else, it seems, is eager to greet a pending commercial flight carrying long missed troops of an unknown kind. What matters is that not one of them is mine. I watch selectively for the familiar face I will soon be greeting, for the same glassy tired facade I know too well, and I try to look past the positively giddy expressions of the others, and the girl who I now know is waiting for a man named Cory.

She is approximately my age with brunette curls tossed carelessly into a ponytail, plain glasses, and an oversized t-shirt creased down the middle by dog tags that have likely kept vigil in his absence. She chatters to another woman, who is also waiting, about restaurant reservations and other modes of anticipatory busy work. It is all I can to do cross my legs tighter and more awkwardly and to chew at already brittle nails and to hope that the New Orleans flight empties before the onslaught occurs of unbearable reunions. Quietly, I wish the Dallas plane would turn around and fly back to whatever Middle Eastern country it originated from, just for the amount of time remaining before my soldier returns. Or I wish that I were in her place, feeling the same surge of mad tingling throughout every atom of the body in those too-long moments before the countdown ends. Relief is a thing I have long put out of heart and mind, and Denial is the vein in which I mostly reside--maintaining a cycle of remembering and forgetting him so I'm not always acutely aware of how painful it is to love and miss a man so intensely.

If I were a bigger, less selfish person I would find it in me to be happy for her and proud even, that she and I are a part of the same parallel universe. Instead, she makes me angry, and with envy and malice I want her suffering to continue, for The Staff Sergeant to be the one instructed to sprint from the Dallas plane door to my arms, even though I know that she has earned this homecoming through the endurance of millions of seconds passing like pinpricks, stinging reminders that life fragmented must somehow move forward as though it were whole.

By the time I've begun nervously gnawing the inside of my cheek, I happen to spot the top of my friend's head, bobbing beneath florescent lights in the flow of travelers. Before she sees me, she calls my phone (always held close) and I urge her to hurry because of what's coming. Without missing a beat, we join paces, step onto the escalator in synch, and crinkle our faces almost together in the funny looking but effective way that dams up the woe of this war thing. She hasn't been here since January, since the two of our soldiers left for the desert. More than anything, I think, she wants her fiance to take my place, to be the first hug after her flight. But nothing is normal anymore--for her, it's this welcome and pulling into the driveway of his house without him being home. For me, it's the stranger living the role I crave to land, the seething joy of enthusiasm weaving through each of her uninvited explanations of directions she has given her Cory or tasks she has carried out in preparation for the soon coming infallible instant, first of locked eyes, then a hug, a kiss, and the way her body will shudder from the shoulders down in a sigh of long-overdue relief.

what IS the what?

The rain knows to fall and the earth knows to drink, and while I watch the natural course of things course on, I can't help noting my envy of the little birds, whose genus and species I cannot cite, that scuttle along the damp grass and glossy asphalt. They have very few responsibilities and very few quests to conquer. Yet I feel oddly at peace sitting here in the back doorway watching them carry on, the just-cut grass, listening to the dribbling rain fall from disjointed gutters into puddles that slowly erode the yard and driveway, and feeling the cool, heavy air enwrap my bare toes. For this contentment there are no questions only the desire for endless amounts of it, a lifetime of uninterrupted moments of stillness, and the reminder of light traffic that I am not alone.

I stopped into the office of a professor I had last semester to grasp at a last ditch effort to prevent me from quitting. I'm not happy at all with where I feel like this masters program is going. And I wanted someone to say something that wasn't practical. I wanted someone to use words like "energy" and "spirit" and "meaning." She had been trying to plan a trip to India for the summer, had done the research and found flights, but she couldn't buy the tickets. She said that something inside of her kept her fingers from closing the deal. In the end, she decided that she hadn't really wanted to go to India and wound up booking a trip to a Caribbean Isle instead. She said that sometimes you just know, and that I needed to find what it was that I wanted to gain. "What is the what?" she gently asked. I folded in on myself and wrinkled my face in a dire effort to keep from crying. Is this English program my India?

This is where The Staff Sergeant, in his sweetest, feigned exasperation, would sigh, "so many questions..."

At twenty-five I don't expect to have the whole of my lifetime mapped out. I don't expect to know every detail, recognize every nuance eloquently relayed, have it all figured out. But it bothers me that the further I climb, with plans of enhancing my future, the more blurry my vision becomes. I want to be a writer and I don't even know what that means anymore. I feel like grabbing it by the limp ankles and wrists and heaving it into my growing pile of lifeless, romantic ideals. I feel like cursing the stars for bestowing me with a world of passions and talents that do not provide a salary.

All that I know for certain is that it needs to mean something, my purpose here on earth, something more than watching the gray-blue clouds shuffle beyond trees like foamy waves - with direction. I could sit here with the company of deep-indigo irises and my sweet pug loyally by my side. I could sip strawberry beer and be in awe of all that rises up around me, but I believe they have names for people like that, and really my need for answers would eventually move me.

13 of 31: giving (confession)

I've heard that it takes about twelve weeks before this starts to feel normal.  I'm not quite there so I can't vouch for the resolution that is said to bloom after three months of struggling to find a balance.  What I do know is that it hasn't come soon, in fact I have done a fair share of backsliding, which leads me to believe that I am progressing, though I can't determine if I've moved from denial to anger or depression in the grief process.  There are no moments that I can recall bargaining for anything so I'm led to think that this is anger.  I feel like I don't know him in pictures, that we might as well be filler models used to show how perfectly other couples' smiles might fit within the frames.

I really wouldn't write any of this if I wasn't supposed to write something daily.  As it turns out, March is full of cynicism and will accurately be remembered as such.  One of my friends recently explained to me that she would like to run away from her life.  I asked her to share her destination because I would happily pack my bags to join her.  I need a manual (written by a human being) on how to do this.  I feel like I'm failing us by not being strong enough, yet I don't know how to be anything other than this.  

Tune in for April, maybe I'll edge toward acceptance next month.  

10 of 31: giving (because I'm obligated)

I don't want to blog anything, furthermore I have nothing positive to say.  I didn't get out of bed until noon today, didn't take a shower until 3pm and never got out of lazy day clothes nor did I bother with make-up.  I didn't leave the house.  I didn't really ever leave the sofa except to whip up my favorite comfort food - a weird mac n' cheese mixture my mom used to make on Sunday afternoons.  It wasn't a great Tuesday.

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.

on the menu: a small serving of self-pity.

Maybe it's the rain, the perpetual, unending Winter, or maybe it's just the truth - the absence of anything fair at all in love and war.  I can't look at his pictures because suddenly it isn't ok to remember him in any dimension.  His face smiling, laughing, caught off guard unseals the vault that keeps him distant.  Remembering feels too sweet, too rich to continue tasting.  

The photos remind me that he's real, that this is all really happening, that I can't touch him or talk to him when I need it, on my time.  They remind me that there were and will be times much better than this, but that this isn't one of them.  This time is for making debts.  

I'm not sure why for five weeks this was easy and that now it isn't, not this week anyway.  I don't want to be strong today.  I want him to be here, to justify the photos that hold our place, for him to be strong enough for the both of us so that I can take a 10 minute break.  I would like for him to walk up behind me, wrap one arm around my waist, pull the hair away from my neck with the other hand and kiss my skin, or at least to be able to imagine it without the bottomless ache.  

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:

I'm going to the gym...

Because if I write it, I'll feel held accountable.

Because I've forgotten that I live in the body of a 25 year old adult, not a 5 year old calorie-burning-inferno.

Because The Staff Sergeant keeps asking about those lofty plans I had to get in shape while he was gone.

Because he's in the gym daily and I don't want him to come home flaunting it and find that I am left with no counter argument.  

Because of today's Nutella, Starburst Gummies, and heavy-on-the-chocolate chocolate milk.

Because I can't kick the blues...and working up a sweat is supposed to help.

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 

an honest attempt

I am determined to write something positive as my fingers hover over these familiar keys. I was recently honored by being allowed to grace the ranks of alltop.com's twenty-something genre and while I think I should feel accomplished and elated, I'm fighting the urge to crawl beneath the nearest rock. Not only have I read the latest posts, I wrote them so I know they haven't been profound or interesting. They and I haven't had much to say.

I'm trying to warm to this new life with its slower pace and limited social interaction. On top of the steep shift of transition, I am still only acquainted with Army-ness, which has currently caused the most distinct abyss of separation to date. My life seems to be carved out in such a monotonous cycle from now until it dissolves into the horizon, accompanied by the end of a lease, the want of graduate school, career-lust, where-we're-going-next, and the rest of uncertainty. I have found that these times of unanchored purgatory are my most miserable. I am the type of person who needs an artery to ground them to a blood source. It doesn't help that the nearest thing to Constant is unavailable. So I wait. I'm waiting for the end of Six Months, waiting to sink my toes into new soil and take root. I'm waiting for him to return so we can talk - what a luxury taken for granted - waiting to start the right job search in the right city in the right industry, waiting to apply to a right local university. So I wait, in this temporary, lonesome state strung between nothing and being engulfed in the thickness of Living According to Direction.

Something positive.

If nothing else, I'm reading. Just like I said I would love to, I'm reading books that have nothing to do with business or school or final exams. I read now in a carefree way that I only recall from memories of grade school or summer vacations. There is no guilt, only wispy delight in worlds cracked open like rich yellowy yolks - the smells and heat of a childhood in Rhodesia and Zambia, the damning panic that moves one to murder, escaping war-torn Sudan to the American violence of Atlanta. They inspire me to strain my reach toward the dream of one day growing into a writer. They let me step away from all the worry of Life's meaning and my role, from the weight of missing him and from counting the hours until he is home again.

While I am desperately trying to appreciate this new journey, the effects of the institution are strong and wrangling. I am a little lost without the obligation of college and afraid of the great-big-world sitting all cocked and ready to either act as my salvation or to happily crush me. This grown up chapter is frightening, especially without the support of my other half. I'll get through it just like I've powered through all the other trying times of my life, and I'll learn new things and I'll grow, just like in the other struggles to find myself. I'm sorry it often manifests from a dreary place inside, but I'll try to do you better than surpluses of desolation.

you show me [I'll find my way]

I'm draped in this navy North Face t-shirt, many sizes too large and soft like infant skin. He offers it to me as he's packing to leave, he gives it to replace the one I had kidnapped and he has since borrowed back. It feels just like the powder blue shirt he wears as he folds this one in his hands and asks if I want it while he's gone. I tell him it would be better on him, sandwiched thin and tempting between him and my finger tips. Calling my bluff, he reminds me that I don't seem to need the lure.

[True.]

I've given in to the taunting, bothersome self-sorrow of those who wait. I've grown tired of shooing Lonesome from my breathing space, and invited her instead for red wine and channel surfing, and a pitiful blog dispersion. I want his letters to spill from my mailbox into mounds of envelopes addressed in his hand. I want him back from parts-unknown so badly that tonight it's choking.

Tomorrow is another day, and that's what he would tell me. "You'll feel better in the morning," he would suggest in his usual, steady optimism. But it would be better to hear it come crisply from his own lips, and in a perfect world, from the pillow beside mine upon waking.

...though your heart is aching

And just like that, he's gone again.

[so long, till season's end...]

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.

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.

only in dreams

Now is not a good time for writing, but here I sit in my ready position, damning the tears that dare to well and the institution...and the war...and the whole fucking thing. I lack the capacity to hold it all in - IT'S NOT WHO I AM! My walls are just not that thick. They just aren't.

[for better or worse]

I talk a lot. I don't like following the grain. I share myself - the joys and fears of this life that I lead. I am not...[a number of things]. I write a lot. I drain the feelings that would otherwise sink me, an emotional pneumonia that would snuff out the fire. I know her, the body trapped beneath water, eyes fixed on its surface, watching the shimmer of sun fade. I cannot, will not ever be her again if I can help it.

Desperate is the search for a true outlet, for a reason to back away from the ledge - someone wearing the same shoes, an empathetic warrior, a place to call Home [where unconditional is a silver key and trusting me and not being so bloody scared]. A chance opportunity presents itself - remarkable and lustrous - and I am rendered to childlike wonder. Eyes wide, pounding heart, a giddiness conquering the synaptic response. And then come the rains [again] that call off the parade.

My heart breaks and he'd never know it if I didn't say so. The event isn't sharp and precise. There are no telling tracers, obvious and burning in the night in a language he would understand. Funny is the obligation I feel suddenly to keep it that way because the culture says to hold it close, circle up the wagons, girls. Be stronger than the predators' threat.

[I'd sooner leave the camp of false rigidness. I am no column, no tower of tenacity.]

From this proverbial leaping point, I gaze into the valley's greener grass then turn back, looking again behind me to survey the people of the mountain. I wonder [for the thousandth time since August] if I will ever belong.

...then I plan to rehearse a "gracious" stance of refusal to said Chance Offer, and enough maturity to quietly release the ache of a dashed dream.

careful now.

Nekot cookies now finished, my apple slices abound. I swear today that each moment will not be strung along by the next handful of whatever little tasty my fingers can grasp. Stress eating, anxiety, whatever name it cowers beneath - the my apple wedges remain, and a Nalgene three-quarters full.

[full].

I am unsure of the roots of that lunar pull, the one that hurls my ravenous mind in one concise direction and later jerks it back again, why there are weeks when I have nothing to write and then minutes where it seems that to not [write] threatens my very survival. I am and then am not. Currently I am. Compulsively I sit before this little window with head dutifully bowed to the glowing screen. I don't much care about the quality of content...well, I do and don't. Some things are just too hairy to write, too vital to the core for removal.

Later, something positive...and perhaps a nap.