little black dress

One Republic ‘Come Home’

All the different lives I could have led, had my hopes at the time become actualized. I’d be living in a different city in one instance, a different coast in another, a different country in yet another. Mostly it brings me back to Cory. I was catching up on my Army Wives programming…my mistake.

I’d like to add a disclaimer here: I am more content than I’ve been in quite awhile. Torn? Sometimes. All my verbal abuse and hot air was all for not–the longing words, the insistence and the feeble interference continues against my insistence. I won’t lie–it hurts. Regardless, all the outpouring of emotion is bringing me back to the person I was at a naive seventeen: the girl who wasn’t untouchable, who cared, and lived, breathed, and loved in the present tense.

Back to memory lane.

I suddenly remembered, staring glassy-eyed at channel fifty, what day tomorrow was. To make myself feel worse (oh masochism, how sweet your sting), I retreated to the basement and opened up the old box, pulling from the bottom, the folded flag. A flurry of newspaper clippings, photographs, and letters collected in my lap as I tore through them feverishly, trying to recapture and reconnect what–who–I’d lost. Five years??! I was a different person, it seems. Knife please? There it is–my image, front page, standing strong in all my colour-on-newsprint grief, glory, and pride, dressed appropriately, chin up, strong-faced, flinching invisibly to the camera lens at the gun salute.

I clutched that damn triangle, as if the harder I squeezed, the less blood he would have lost, the less torn apart I’d be. I held onto it, white knuckled, staring at that damn ring, satellite reception of my yellow-ribbon boy on one knee flashing through my mind. My solemn torture, keeping composure, but breaking down, and building up walls around me all at once. Will they ever be knocked down?

I wonder with confused wistfulness, pain, but no regret, how my life would have turned out, hopping from base to base with him. Him. There is nothing and no one spectacular enough to erase your first love–the smell of Old Spice and gun oil, the promises and the estrangement………and the way he watched me like I’d disappear any second. I was not the one to leave.

The length of time I have waited to be looked at the same way feels much longer than it has. When you reach adulthood, years become the fleeting summer months of childhood–they slip by. It was silly of me, that young, to expect I had what I was looking for, that everything would, as I’d repeated and tried to convince myself in rough times, be just fine.

I hold a fondness that I shouldn’t, perhaps, and a closeness still that I should let go of. There is also an ever present survivors guilt, and bitterness to be the only one still standing. I’m angry, having always stepped up beside the ones I loved, breathed in time, and felt what they felt, that I could not experience, or even fathom, a death to make journalists salivate (pen to paper).

He’s gone.

Will this always be how I spend days off, standing, like a photograph myself, dressed according to occasion, hands clasped, and mouth clenched shut, shuddering and drowning in memories. I loved him. I let him go. I allowed myself to forget him, but I cannot.

“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
How did I get here?

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground…

…The same as it ever was.”                
                                      The Exies, ‘Once in a Lifetime’

Here’s to you, sir.

You didn’t leave me after all.