The responsibility to appropriately represent (a) character(s)

What I am trying to tell you is this: in my own way, I love you. And you can trust me, mostly. I won't lead, wouldn't lead, haven't led you wrong. It would be bad form. But please know that if I do lead you wrong, I once thought it was right.

- Monson, Neck Deep, Appendix

I used to think that what I wanted was to be like you (or the many of you who are military wives). But really, I was an artist first and "they" say, "be true to yourself." I am a left-winged liberal. I don't believe in war. I would lend my crossed legs to a cause in need of silent protest. I try only to buy organic produce. There isn't much of me that fits the bill anyway. And there is the almost palpable barrier--a man in crisis. I don't think he reads this garbage anymore, so I am feeling a little less censored. That isn't even half of it. Maybe he thinks that The Lonely Sound was abandoned or he doesn't care anymore. In his own way, he loves me.

In my own way, I love you.

Lately I imagine the trajectory of a bullet. I imagine the spatter patterns it might cause on a wall or some other wayward surface. Brain matter, other parts. It doesn't matter. I play out the motions only in my head, and I'm only telling this because I'm tired of pussyfooting around the idea of self. I don't care if you like me. I should never have cared. And the truth, if there is such a thing, is that it may not be in the cards for me to "be" one of "you" army wives. Because life is a force to be reckoned with. It will happen according to or not at all resembling the outcome I reach for. We are born alone. We die alone. I write alone. I am beginning to believe that he wants to be alone, a man as Island.

(I am trying to disassociate myself.)

I am beginning to dream of the Anywhere I could move, the Anything I could do, all the dreams and ideals that dreamers and idealists conjure. I was, after all, an artist first, and then somehow his and somehow this.

I thought for the first time tonight that I could be okay married to creativity, the lonesome but not lonely eccentric. I thought that I could move in a couple of months for him, indulging the have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too element of whatever the fuck is going on here, but I won't. I need more satisfaction than that. I don't think I was ever meant to be the understudy, the shadow lurker. Some hours do belong solely to me.

And maybe I am the "married" type, and he is the one who isn't. Well, there isn't anything I can do to change him.

There isn't anything I can do to change him...but I was always honest. I always aimed for the LONG TERM.

Perhaps though, it's me? I always run. I'm kind of preparing to run now, peeling back the layers of happy-family-visions and the imagined faces of our unborn children, a fusion of more than individuals.

I feel like I am losing and because I don't care about winning per se (and he does), I think I am more privy to, or likely to examine the behavior of dissolution. We are fuzzy at the edges.

I am trying to read Brenda Miller's Season of the Body but it is proving difficult. Her focus is on the end of a relationship with Keith, who also makes an appearance in Blessing of the Animals in a beautiful essay called "A Different Person." It is so painful to imagine us parting ways. So unbelievably painful. I have harnessed so much in this Man, this ourness of life, a river fed by us as tributaries. And now what?

I am my own captain. (though not quoted, per request.)

I am not challenging the "who" manning the wheel. I am sure as shit my own captain.

Hold yourself together.

(punish someone else.)

This morning, I rolled out of bed with swollen eyes from the night before--things are a little tricky on the home front right now. I had an 8 a.m. date with a friend to scope the local farmer's market. To make the remedy that much more potent, I opened the door and was greeted with bizarre and unseasonal temperatures. I had to grab a sweater before leaving...in AUGUST.

I have been told that if you don't make the market around opening time, the offerings are a little picked over, so my friend picked me up a little after eight. We got coffee first and then walked the block-or-two it takes to get from mid-Franklin St. to the rows of simple, white tents. There was a breeze blowing slightly enough to make the warm cup in my hands enjoyable and to remind me that Autumn is up next.

Fruit was on my mind, but you have to understand how difficult it is to stay focussed once you're faced with the cartons and baskets all color filled and sensually ripe. Naturally, I couldn't help myself from scooping up some purple hull peas, and heirloom tomatoes, and local eggs (in addition to the peaches that I had anticipated taking home).

Unrelated--I'm thinking about leaving this space. So many people that I know and love have been invited here when my life made a lot more sense and while their support is appreciated, I have found that their viewing pleasure causes me to be significantly less candid than I used to be. And now it almost feels like a silent gridlock; I am afraid to open myself. I need a little corner where I can feel comfortable again, so it seems that the Lonely Sound might be coming to a close in order for other possibilities to flourish in its place. Sometimes it's necessary to trim back branches for new growth. It kind of feels like I would be abandoning two years of myself...so I'll keep you posted. No rash decisions today, just thinking.

the full significance of a character

It's the second of two acts: World War II era, South Pacific. "Peggy the pin-up" takes the USO stage in a sequined red dress. The sparkle of scarlet in contrast with her platinum wig and the soft spotlight and the quintessential period microphone set the scene. We are the "soldiers," the audience. This song is dedicated by the Marilyn Monroe look-alike to us, to them. She wraps her delicate fingers around the microphone's base and as the piano cues, her sultry lips part to shape the words that I can almost entirely sing along to.

I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places...

She slowly swings her hips into the lounge-like performance, maintaining her persona of deliberate sensuality. Peggy croons through the second verse, the third, and in the fourth she unexpectedly falls out of character. Her bright lips fight against the stage smile that she so diligently attempts to hold against the weight of reality. Stepping back from her microphone, she turns away from the audience. It takes longer than a moment for her to regain composure, long enough that the accompanist glances up from her music, concerned and confused, long enough for those of us in the audience to realize that this is not scripted. Her grief ripples through the dark theatre--contagious. I see the silhouettes of other women subtly wiping tears from their cheeks, just as I stretch the sleeve of my cardigan over the inside of my wrist. Pressing it to my face, trying to stifle my own sadness, I blot at tears more slowly than they fall dripping down the front of my dress. The actress uncoils a couple of times, fans her face in efforts to reestablish the order of necessary existence, and eventually turns again to face us smiling. She finishes the song breathy and with a wink. She finishes not as the Army wife we catch a glimpse of, but as "Peggy Jones", starlet, pin-up, community theatre actress-in-role.

will the circle be unbroken

Life at the end of a semester is something like I imagine Plath's bell jar was, or rather the motive for her crawling beneath the house, taking pills, and truly hoping not to be found. At any rate, try to understand the madness and the always-tingly-tightness of anxiety as a physical symptom - strung across the muscles of a lower back - and the lack of sleep and the gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair. That has been the last two or so weeks. Then there was my invitation for a Mother's Day weekend, which was mostly kind of okay except for the lingering anxiety and equally tingly-tightness of muscles prolonged by comparisons to my father or early afternoon drinking or the mention of a man friend. I wanted a couple of days to lavish in the freedom of my first year of grad school completed but it didn't work out that way. Tomorrow morning (earlier than I had planned for) my father, who just today compared me to my mother, is picking me up for a week long road trip to the coast of South Carolina. While a suburban is a fairly spacious vehicle, I often feel that the 250 miles between here and home is not enough area of space. If I had had the time to myself, the luxury of surfacing slowly enough to avoid the bends, I would likely not be so dreading the next 7-8 days.

It's difficult to understand what has happened over the last four months. Mom kindly pointed out that she was worried about me having spent so much time alone - a comment spawned out of one of my explanations of these new lifestyle changes. But something has changed in me. I used to be this independent before I left their house, before I had the physical escape of leaving the tumultuous energy of home. I would sit in my room and do god-knows-what for hours without being bored. I mostly recall painting in the floor, the oatmeal carpet stained multicolored with acrylic pigment, the therapy they never funded.

When the rooms here felt too silent I looked to those memories for reassurance. Then one day I was strong enough to just look forward. The unsettling part has been realizing that I have re-arrived here, that I am somehow enough and that I am content. As I was talking to a friend about this very phenomenon, she used a phrase that struck home, "false independence," as in feeling needless in the front of one's mind while holding tightly to the security that remains in him, even if he's not here. It's like her daughter - able to walk but refusing to take a step without the aid of an adult's finger gripped within her tiny fist. Maybe I've only sold myself on the hype, just like I'm supposed to, distanced myself through days upon days of the mantras, the whatever-it-takes methods of coping. In the process I have fallen in love with my little piece of the world. This house is my domain. This house that I thought I could only loathe and curse is my niche, and I kind of hate the thought of leaving my security if only for a week. Leaving means breaking all of those habits that I've built my independence on. In moments like these, on the eve of variation, I dread packing and driving away from the reliability of home. I miss him more. I feel like a traitor to the routine that keeps me from flying apart in all directions. I start to feel short of breath.

He sent a couple of pictures the other day of him Over There. His smile is still perfectly heartbreaking and his eyes and his form and his skin-just-out-of-reach, and what I first thought was how much I wanted to touch his hair. He in his uniform and my bags waiting to be packed make the earth shift underneath my steady footing. Yesterday all of this seemed so much easier, and coming full circle, it would seem that my sense of independence is completely false. I have wagered my ability to survive on the continuation of a domestic cycle of old things done in new ways and old passions reignited. I've gone back to my savior, Creation. As long as my hands are busy, as long as I can dovetail the pieces that I've made, I'm fine. You would never know how much it hurts to be apart from him - most of the time these days I don't.

the silence [i] keep from [my] head

I try to look happy and somewhere in my heart I must actually be happy for them, but mostly I'm the same kind of jealous as every other summer of my adult life when the engagement announcements come pouring in. I just learned that one of my oldest friends is getting married. I think I knew him when he was three years old. It's hard enough to believe that we're so much older and that I think we should all be so much more experienced, so much further aged than we are. And then the childish tears well, the whiney phrase, "not fair" finds use, and the pacing begins and I can no longer look around the elephant in every room. I think to myself, "well, wouldn't it be nice..."

This time it has very little to do with someone else being in a place that I am not - metaphorically speaking. Instead it has everything to do with the volume and obstacle of oceans and continents, this goddamn war, the lushness of spring versus alien deserts. We've talked about "taking the plunge" but...a voice is a delay is a phone call is lacking. This is neither the time or place and that is precisely the notion that throws me off balance. Life on pause is worse than life remodeled, is worse than living like the hours are mine. I can lose myself in a frenzy of recipes and organic vegetable seeds and cold brewed coffee and local eggs and manual mowers and prayers and mantras and clean plastics, but only until I remember:

I want him to come home.

I want him to come home.

I want him to come home.

Sundays

...are our "thing." Some couples travel or participate in extreme sports together but the thing that we most love to do is wring every drop of rest and relaxation out of Sundays. I used to sleep in with him but as deployment got nearer, I started not being able to stay in bed past 8am. And since PT calls him into work really early every other day, save Saturdays, he doesn't want to budge before mid-morning and I'm okay with that. So if I get up early I do my thing until the day draws him out from under the covers, and if we both sleep in...well, you know.

We almost always make breakfast together, which is one of the most critical elements of our Sunday experience. Before he moved to The House of a Thousand Males, he would wow me with the most incredible omelets filled with whatever was left over from our week of dinners. Omelets being one of my culinary weaknesses, I am always fascinated by the taste and presentation he can produce, and yet he always thinks I'm humoring him when I tell him that he'll forever be the omelet maker of this couple. We brew up some coffee, sit leg-to-leg on the couch and find something mindlessly entertaining to watch until we're finished. My coffee is always hardly touched because I'm one of those one-task-at-a-time eaters but it will wait for me on the corner of the coffee table until later.

Later comes when we decide it's time for lunch or errands or both. I will heat up the morning's brew to take along and without fail I will spill it in his truck. There is an ill enforced ban issued on open containers in The Monster (truck). He will grab whatever is in the back - a dirty t-shirt, sweats, the occasional paper towel - to treat my havoc and he will roll his eyes and comment in a humorously exasperating tone. Then we leave down his street for an army supply store or the book store or Walgreens or the range. Maybe we'll see a movie or rent one, and eventually we find our way back [home is a relative term]. I'll make dinner, he'll tell me it's amazing, then we do homework or watch a movie or he packs for the next thing.

There isn't a thing that makes this routine special except that it taps into a kind of normal that only shows itself on rare occasions. The Army keeps life in a perpetual spin. Sundays are anchors in a constant barrage of anything-goes.

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.

And also...

Deployment, go to hell.

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.  

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:

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 

stunted progress

[the manic state wanes, giving way to something more familiar.]

My smile curls into something less...cheerful.  Meanwhile, I want him come home with an incalculable desire.  If I had the energy I'd throw myself in the floor and wail and thrash my limbs.  But I don't have the energy and I'm pretty sure people would talk about me behind my back.

Relief

My title photo seems quite out of place since our serious Winter broke today after a week.  While I appreciate the season and I like the crispness, the clean sensation of cold air, and our occasional snow, I was kind of glad to hear the birds chirping and to feel a warm preview of Spring.  Also, the sooner Winter subsides, the sooner he'll be home.

I've made it almost two weeks.  I'd be lying if I didn't own up to some pretty wretched days, some horrifying moods, and supplements to help me sleep.  And honestly there was at least one full day I wasn't sure I could do this.  My dad always tells me that the darkest hour is before daybreak and here it's certainly applicable.  There is a full range of uncontrollable emotions that go hand in hand with sending the man who holds your heart off to war.  The one I'm most ashamed of is that particular episode of anger.  Anger that he's gone, that he left me, anger at the universe for fating me to this position, anger at myself for blaming him.  It isn't like that and I know it.  This isn't something he did to me, however the knowing better only amplifies inevitable feelings of guilt.  The Staff Sergeant is a good man, the best, and I know how very lucky I am to so proudly stand by him (most of the time).  Then daybreak--and I awoke a new woman, the fever had gone and I felt like myself again.  

No one ever says that this life is full of ease and rose gardens, but somehow abandoning it is impossible.  I've hurled myself into a care packaging oblivion.  Every time I feel like crying I start planning the next one.  I've gotten back into school and am getting ready to start a new job.  All of that and I'm slowly chipping this new house into some semblance of order.  Tonight I hung my closet bar for all of the clothes I have that wouldn't fit into the tiny crevices this house deemed closet space.  I was so motivated by that small victory that I sorted the storage room and put together my new desk chair.  Now I'm sitting for the first time at my study space and not a moment too soon.  A magenta glow falls over the old tin table top I'm using as my work surface.  I have a victory cocktail to the right of my laptop and soon I'll go fish out a good photo of my courageous soldier to put in the corner. 

Moments like this let me peek from beneath the layers of Overwhelming just long enough to see the light.  I can do this thing that challenges me, this living on my own, this new town and old house of Murphy's law.  I can wait, be patient, be okay while he's away because he's doing the same thing for me.  

When an ocean sits right between us

How do you write a swallowing heartache? How do you convey the emptiness left behind, the no-one-else-is-home-ness, the reality of letting him go because this is what he was made for?  

All along I knew I would have to--let him be less mine and more Soldier.  So he is now, far away for too long.  And it isn't fair because I want to know he is always safe, and selfishly, because I want his eyes to start my days and for his quiet breath to end them.  I want to be able to touch and smell and kiss him and to forget my awkward so-long and the reasons I had to do it.  

It's hard describing the way your emotions hijack any notion of self control when you have had to imagine him leaving with your heart in one of his velcro pockets.  The tactful threads wear thin and fray and just when he needs you to be the strongest, you're burned out and completely transparent.

Winter Song

on to something new [ready or not]

I have so much to say and so little energy and liberty to etch it all across this screen.  Christmas left something to be desired, new year's eve, however was perfect -- more perfect than perfect.  This life has a way of letting one glaze every moment with high-gloss hyper-perfection, given the right timing and circumstance.  Each breath and smile is caught and archived, pinned like fragile specimens behind glassy walls, slow motion memories with over-pronounced dialogue and historical inaccuracy.  

I err most often on optimism -- foolish, really.  I imagine the still frames more richly colored, sugary and scripted.  For example, I omit certain attempts at death-by-Dorito-consumption and possible engagement rings (on my mother's finger), large life-engulfing trunks, drunken welcome-homes, all consuming guilt, the kind of "good bye" that truly has the power to grind one's heart to dust.  I have added brightly adorned Christmas trees, comfort and relaxation, smiles, security.  Next year will be just long enough for my mind to fully buy into all of those forged memories and I will probably be surprised when it plays out just the same.  

general complaints regarding the institution of chaos

I don't know whether I should laugh or cry or shatter things weaker than I feel right now, for the pleasure of a power trip and the satisfaction of destruction. Don't ever wonder how it might be more difficult than it is; it could always be worse.

He's always full of new news and it almost always makes a mockery of the things I thought I could rely on, even when they aren't desirable. I've been bracing for some events since the beginning of us. They are bristles-raised threatening, guns-and-bombs scary; they creep into the dreams of even a sound sleeper to chip away at rest long before they are urgently upon us. Nevertheless, a person can condition oneself for anything given enough time to build up walls of sandbags. Even a war-flood becomes a tolerable idea when you have had time to prepare for it.

And so I think that's the worst of it. Nothing is bigger or more difficult than all we've been through already and all that is written into future date boxes. Life on the coat-tails of a soldier isn't billed to be an easy one - constantly jerked and bounced around in the shadow of his duty to country. No matter how jostled, the peak was in sight just above the crags and ridges. It always appeared to be reachable until new news birthed low clouds to make me question our direction.

I knew that you in the calamity of war would be fucking awful! And yes, it is simply unbearable to let my mind entertain the possibility of that phone-call - so I don't, I can't. If I did, every tomorrow would be "insurmountable". There are times when it feels like we are held together only by fraying scraps, but you come home and we stitch the wounds and mend the tears. What do we do if there is no home, and all the patched up ragged shreds wear faster and thinner? It isn't this over that, it's both circumstances stacked high and heavy one upon the other.

This is a life for the mad, the numb, the inhuman. The truth is, I don't want to be stronger. I want to crush thin, perfect glass between a swift downward blow and a solid surface. I want to scream and kick my feet against the floor in an epic tantrum. I want to tear out my love-drunk heart to wring it sober.

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.