Packing, Part 2

As I write this, if I peek over the top of my laptop screen, his rucksack sits, being filled with gear that is going to Iraq, slowly but surely the bag gets bigger and bigger. Correction, he’s on to his duffel bag now. I can remember the first time I laid eyes on that duffel bag, when he was sitting at the airport, home from Germany, and we were meeting for the very first time.

I do not miss the irony, that the same duffel bag that sat on my bedroom floor holding his stuff, as we figured out how to make us, out of two separate beings, is the same duffel bag that will carry his stuff, some of it the same stuff, to Iraq.

The fear is gripping me again. It is cold, it makes my heart, which races normally, hurt inside my ribcage, it squeezes around my lungs. I am losing time, every day, every good day, where we wander around, eat dinner, laugh at each other, every bad day, when I am moody, and nothing seems to go the way we want it to, is a day closer to Iraq. I hate that country. I hate it with a vile, unrelenting, desperate sense of the word, for it stands to take all I hold near and dear from me.

I told my mother once, in the midst of a sobbing crying-jag, which did not seem to ever stop, that I had nothing, am nothing, without him. It is true. Of everything I have endured, every bad thing I have had happen to me; nothing hurts so bad, nothing scares me so much, as the idea of him deploying. I have always held some small part of myself out of my relationships, kept a portion of my heart safe, and I forgot to do that this time, I forgot to keep all of me out of this, and just launched myself into his world. There is no part of my life he hasn’t gotten a grip on, no part of what I want that he isn’t in, nothing I do not need that does not involve him. I was not being a drama queen when I told my mother I would fall apart without him. I have no idea how I’m going to drag myself through a year with him gone, how I am going to handle the worry, the wait, and the sense of a missing piece.

I’m fairly certain this is what drowning feels like. And I’m fairly certain sleep is going to be elusive again.

~Jennifer