Absence

Today I was shopping for a greeting card for a friend of mine. This is never a speedy process for me. I always end up reading them all like a hundred times before I pick the winner (of course then I also usually end up buying five of the them just to “have around for later.”) As I was reading through the racks, (and racks and racks- thank goodness I got my cup of coffee BEFORE I went card shopping. I ended up needing actual sustenance for this little hour long project...) I came across this sepia-toned photo card with a cute little kid on the front dressed up in grown-up clothes, holding a balloon, looking off into the distance with a sad face (you know the card. I’m positive you’ve seen the picture before.) On the outside it said “I know that absence makes the heart grow fonder...” And on the inside, it wittily read, “But right now I’d be ok being a little less fond of you.”

This made me simultaneously chortle and cry (I’m the crazy lady who cries in card shops. It’s fine.) “Wishing I was less fond of you” could be the title of this week’s story, but its subtitle would definitely have to be “A watched pot never boils.” (I’m picturing it on a marquee at an old movie theater. My assumption is that no one would want to see this movie.)

J and I are nearing the halfway point in his deployment. Every person I have ever met who has gone through this says the same thing: There is a predictable rhythm to a deployment. There are peaks, and there are deep deep valleys in the passage of time. And, so I am told, they all pretty much hit everyone at the exact same times. Always wanting to believe that I don’t really fit a stereotype of any sort, I never really paid attention to this ebb-and-flow-of-deployment-time lore. It was all going to be FINE for me. Obviously.

Turns out this isn’t really the case. I’m feeling it just like everyone else does. On exactly the same timeline, and in exactly the same magnitude (me= not special at all.)

Even when I go back through this blog, the nature of my entries has changed as the deployment time has passed, just like folks said it would. (Yeah, I actually sat down the other day for the first time and read my writing here from start to finish. Wow. That was eye-opening.)

The first four weeks, plainly stated, quite simply sucked. That’s about it. I missed J every day. Everything I saw made me think of him. I was sad…and angry. And felt more than a little bit lost. And I spent my days trying to figure out what a J-less life looked like. At that point, we were still struggling to figure out how we were going to keep in touch, trying texts and calls at different times of the day, trying to find a pattern. (…and some spots where he could stand, you know, on one leg holding a goat and a coat hanger during cloudy weather on odd numbered hours so that we could get some phone service that didn’t make it sound like I was talking to Optimus Prime.)

And then we began to refine the art of sending forth into the capable hands of the US Postal Service letters and care packages, and counted the days between here and there (turns out, on average, it’s about 10 days, which all things considered is remarkable to me.) And some of this stuff worked, and some of it did not. But trying to establish those patterns, looking for some normalcy at least started to take my mind off of being scared and frustrated and *actively* missing him every day.

But let’s just say this- that first month, it was a hard way to live.

Then we sorta started to get into a groove. And the regular communication became exciting. My heart still leapt when I heard the phone ring. And we were each doing new stuff without the other one, so we were dying to relay every last detail, just like if we were sitting in the same room. There’s new stuff to talk about, and we tried desperately to keep it as close as we could to our same ol’ relationship. This, sadly, doesn’t really work. Because you’ve only got about three minutes at a time to chat instead of hours. And at least for J and me, who function primarily on complex conversations picking on one another using ridiculous puns, clever word-play and playful banter, well, that’s hard to do on a three minute phone call with a three second time delay. Hearing his joke a minute after he tells it makes it less funny. (Let me be clear. He is not normally funny. I am not admitting that he is funny.)

And then, somewhere after that (say, three-four months in?) well then, it all just becomes life. In the words of J, it becomes Groundhog Day, each day an exact replica of the day before. Nothing new to share. Nothing new to say. Conversations become a little shorter just simply because there is nothing interesting to report, or at least nothing important enough that you feel it necessary to take up the short time you have by relaying it. Some of the details of life start to get lost. And your new overseas telephone relationship of three minute snip-its of life, ends up hitting just the highlight reel. “What did you do today?” “Not much. Up early. Went for a run. Went to work. Did some stuff. Same things.” These were what I referred to as my Pinky and the Brain days (“What do you want to do today, Brain?” “The same thing we do every day…try to take over the world.”)

This time was sort of emotionless for me. He had been gone long enough to not be actively sad every.single.day. We had established enough of a pattern for me to not be actively worried about him every.single.day. There was nothing new to talk about. And I just sorta got lost in my daily routine. In fact, the emotion I felt most at this time was guilt…guilt that I WASN’T sad and worried 24/ 7, guilt that I was carrying on with life as normal here, and guilt that I couldn’t come up with more to say when we talked (for those who know me, me at a loss for words is quite an event.) I had come to a mental place of just dealing with it; resignation to the distance.

But next in the cycle comes the blissful anticipation of the mid-tour leave. And every day becomes talk about what you will do when you see each other next. The places you’ll go. The activities you’ll try to jam into the little time you have to share. Planning and something new to talk about! This is a fun time. Add to that that J’s mid-tour leave for us is going to do with WEDDING planning, and well! I’ve clearly been abuzz with excitement about the leave.

UNTIL…just about now.

Now, well, now we wait. And even though as I look at a calendar I see that in less than a month (more like three weeks, actually) I will see J again with my own eyes on our own soil, it seems an utter lifetime away. I’m not even excited or anxious anymore. I’m actively pissed at time for choosing to suddenly come to a screeching halt. What’s a girl gotta do to speed things up? A watched pot may never boil, but I’m sure about to.

If one more person asks me if I’m excited to see J, I might scream. (What am I going to say to that? No thanks. Not interested. Thanks for asking but I’m just fine not actually laying eyes on him because he’s really not that nice to look at anyway? Come on, people. Think first.) If one more person engages me in a conversation about how I’m going to see J SOO soon, and how it must be nice to have the waiting over and how fast this six months has gone, I’m gonna straight punch *those* guys. Because it’s NOT soon. The waiting is NOT over. And this six months has been the LONGEST of my life. And better yet, we still have six more to go!

My military friends are laughing at me. Because this is the exact timeline…the exact schedule, the exact ebb and flow of emotions that they told me to expect while he was gone. Ok. You win seasoned vets. You win. This is the time in the deployment that I feel like I’m at the absence-making-me-fonder threshold (I’m sure it’s even worse for the actual people serving the time. This is probably why they give out mid-tour leaves. Good work, Army psychologists. And thank you.)

I suppose the good news is that if I wasn’t so damned fond of J to begin with, I wouldn’t care so much about seeing him again. So, that’s saying something, yes? But in the meantime, if you come across me in the next couple of weeks and I seem a little on edge, I apologize. I guess you could say that I’m just busy being very fond of my fiancé.