He's leaving

We were eating stir fry I had made.
I was lying on my bed. He was sitting on the floor in front of the TV.
“Oh yeah, I found out where I’m going today.”
My boyfriend (Rico Ramon Don Juan aka Mark Storm…Ha! sorry folks, inside joke) is a Senior Airman in the U.S. Air Force. The first half of 2006 he was deployed to United Arab Emirites for six months and had been told he would be deployed again in June. He just didn’t know the location.
“Where?” I asked.
“Iraq.”

I was quiet while he kept eating and watching TV. I wondered what he was thinking, if he was worried at all about telling me and if he was scared.
I was.
There were different thoughts fighting for attention in my head – news footage from Baghdad, stories I had read, military funerals I had covered.

Neither of us said anything about it for awhile. Finally I said I didn’t want him to go and that I was going to kidnap him so that he couldn’t.
It was silly, I know, but I didn’t know what else to say about it. I was still processing what he told me. I mean, I’m still processing it three weeks later. There are questions and thoughts that are still works in progress that I can’t even piece together to write on this blog.

I was upset about it for the few days after I found out. Then my mom reminded me it’s not about me. It’s about him and what I can do for him before he leaves and when he gets back.

Suddenly I felt selfish. Of course I was worrying about his safety and his feelings about being deployed again. But I had also been wondering what I was going to do without him for 6 months, how lonely I was going to be and how much I will miss him. Thoughts of how pointless the war is also crossed my mind more than a few times… but I guess that’s neither here nor there…

So, I’ve been operating off of my mom’s advice. I don’t want him to worry about me worrying about him and I want him to know I’m here now and will be when he gets back in December.

These next couple of months before he leaves should be interesting…