All is Fair...

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does.

Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
James A. Baldwin

It would be a lie to say that I never think of it. It can't be compared to anything else. You aren't supposed to break down pieces of someone you love, analyze them, and separate the different sides to this degree- at least, I never have in the past. But when you love a man, and that man happens to be a solider (and already, happens is not even the right word here- chooses), it puts everything under a microscope in a unique way.

I remember the first time I realized that he was in Afghanistan. It sounds strange, but saying goodbye to him in Flora meant we wouldn't see each other. Although I worried about him to a certain degree, it was hard to wrap my mind around where he would actually go when he got on a plane. A couple of weeks after he had gone, I pulled up older pictures of Andy and him, and stopped on one. My breath caught, and I felt like the room was spinning. He had a gorgeous grin, and the sweetest face that I wanted to hold and kiss. But he was in his uniform, and held a helmet in one hand, and a huge weapon up high in the other. I cropped the picture to just his face. I felt like a punch in the stomach to look at the whole thing. I can look at it now- it took a while.

Most times, he is just Sky. He's a guy that I adore more than anyone on this earth. He is my boyfriend with the silver ring still on his finger. Who he works for and what he occasionally plays a very tiny part. There are small twinges of it that can fade with a simple kiss. Then there are

times when I feel it start to creep in- when he got his hair cut, for instance, and it was like a flashback to his leave visit. There are the times I open up a closet and see camouflage everywhere. But his hair grows again, and the closet door shuts. It can be a small piece of life.

But the fact is that he is a solider, too. I am shaken by it when he hears a sound that is too close to sounds he heard in his little room. If one afternoon spent on a video chat with him could be engraved on me so deeply-listening to explosions while we talked-then I wonder how he can act so calm even though his heart races. He tells stories about the months over there, and I am mezmorized, but sometimes it sinks in slightly that they aren't stories. They are his memories.

It is ingrained deeper when most of our talk about the future swirls around his next deployment. Life is broken into sections; plans of what we want to do before the next time he leaves, how life will be the months we're apart, and what kinds of things will happen after it's

over. People ask me all the time if he will ever have to go back. The hard-to-swallow truth is that he will always be going back somewhere. We will always live three years at a time.

While I admit that the thought of the next deployment already could bring me to tears if I think too long, I also recognize how thankful it makes me. Most couples think they have more of a guarantee to always have each other, whether they should think that or not. But the uncertainty makes me grateful for everything just a bit more. Bittersweet, maybe- but I think there is

something amazing in the kind of love that can surpass distance, time, loneliness even.

I have the time I have now, and that is what I want to focus on now- our lives together at this moment and months down the road. He is here, and ideas and plans fall like a cool rain around us. There is no umbrella. We open our hands, lift our faces, and dance when no one is watching.