To my Fiance ~
Last night you left.
This morning the house is quiet, things are neater than usual but it feels like an ordinary day. Maybe you're at an early morning Physical Training (PT) session and I'm going about my normal routine- brushing teeth, picking out my work clothes, making tea, grabbing the yogurt smoothie for breakfast at the office. It's a busy day. I bounce from early meeting, to lunch meeting...I am ON! I coordinate with my co-workers and our volunteer at the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) pick-up site, I get in the zone and am sooo close to knocking out the full e-newsletter today...then I mess up my schedule and end up driving to base for a Family Readiness Group (FRG) meeting that is actually tomorrow. I turn around and head back to work at a cute local cafe with a fresh-made lemonade for the last couple hours of work. The campaign season is in full swing for local elections and I have a volunteer meeting after my 5pm networking meet-up, and phone-banking for a kick-ass progressive female candidate after that.
All this is my regular, my normal, but I'm doing it today because by 8:30pm when I finally make the three trips from the car to the house with my laptop and workout clothes and library books, and grab some HoneyNut Cheerios and a well-deserved Jameson & Juice for dinner it will really hit me that you're not coming home tonight.
I miss you.
As much as we've been fighting and as much as we've been stressed over wedding business and work business...a Tour of Duty (TDY) is not a lot of fun.
Does it have it's benefits? Sure. By the end of weeks of daily Skyping and abstinence, we're going to have crazy I-missed-you-and-now-you're-here!-get-naked sex. I will marvel again at how awesome we are at web-based communication. We're supposed to work our way through a pre-marriage counseling workbook and this will most likely happen...along with making fun of the pre-marriage counseling chapter headings and some deep, soul-searching conversations. I'm going to have a list of dinners that I'm sure you've missed and will cook for you as soon as you're back all worked out in my head. A couple weeks in the future, this house will be CLEANSED. My to-do list will be shorter. And I may have your favorite root beer (the ones I've been hiding from you in the bathroom sink cupboard where you never look) in the fridge, waiting to surprise you. Or maybe I'll save that root beer for the next time I need to say "sorry".
Tonight I'm ok. It takes me a couple days to get used to sleeping without you but I have a plan. It involves a weekend whitewater rafting trip, and enjoying nature with women-folk. I'll be splitting a bed with someone else. Now, don't get jealous- we're just friends. Next week is what I'm dreading. When it will hit me like a ton of bricks that I've been abandoned. Again. Do other significant others feel this way? The spouses of pilots, perhaps? Or presidents? Or start-up entrepreneurs?
I have my own life. WE have our own lives, we spouses of traveling soldiers. And yet separation is one facet of our lives that we become reacquainted with again and again. This time it isn't Afghanistan, or Syria. But learning to live with the fact that it could be is difficult. Almost as difficult as being without you.
love,
B.
*Historic Postcards photo credit:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ourfamilylegends/tolilly_fromson_ben%20001.jpg
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