The drive home from the airport.
Last winter when we said goodbye, I didn't cry. This time, I guess because I now understand how hard it really is for me to be without him, the tears came freely.
We drove to Portland last night and stayed together in a hotel, while our babies stayed with grandma and grandpa.
There are moments we share that are so simple and intimate, they could never be recorded in a journal or log, for writing them out could never do them justice. Just looks and embraces. Soft touches and words unspoken but felt.
We ordered room service and lounged around. I tried to overcome my tendency to become distant, even angry, at the dawn of separation. I'm pretty sure that last time he left I didn't cry because I was too cross with him.
With added understanding and warning from our last experience, he was able to call to me as I slipped from him. He told me once when I snapped at him, "I know you are not angry. I know you are sad. It's going to be alright, though, and we're together for now, so let's not ruin it."
I guess it will go quickly. He'll be back in November to visit over the Thanksgiving break, and then it's only a small leap until his graduation on December 19th and a beautiful Christmas, with the promise of the gift of our third son.
Looking ahead doesn't quite curb the heartache that has beset me today. I dropped him at the airport and drove away alone, listening to the soundtrack of our passion; the songs that remind me of laughing and kissing and sometimes arguing with him.
And my mind raced through "the worst" as I imagined his plane on fire or his shuttle tumbling down the freeway. He's always telling me that I have an overactive imagination.
I planned in my mind what I would do next. Making plans is something I do to cope, I've realized.
When I get to thinking this way, I have to talk myself down.
But what it all comes down to is this; "it is not good that man should be alone" (Abraham 5:14)
I know I am not alone. My Duke is in my heart and we will be together again soon.
I love him. More. Because I know what I am without him.
A mess.
Comments
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (by John Donne)
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."
So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.
XO
Leigh