To My Sailor, Deployed

“I won’t think about that now. I’ll think about it tomorrow, when I can stand it!”
                    ~Scarlett O’Hara



Last Night

Standing chest to chest in the almost-dark, deafened by the rumble of the dryer drum on its third and final load, I wished the world would open up its jaws like a massive, breaching whale and swallow us whole. Whole heads. Whole arms. Whole hips and legs and ankles. Down to our bare feet with toes overlapping toes on cold concrete.

Like tiny pink krill swimming unseen amongst the salt, suck us under and hide us in some sea-witch’s cave with seaweed for a door. Let no man hear us laughing over the weeping waves. Leave the crying for the gulls. If they search, sweep them somewhere warmer where yellow beams penetrate the weaker tides. We don’t mind the cold—we will hold each other closer and thank God for the days given back.

Take us down into the deep blue ocean, world-whale. Take us both.

Underwater we wouldn’t have to breathe. We could grow gills like fish and never come up for air again. Would you like to have webbing between your fingers and toes? Or would you rather have one long tailfin instead? You can choose. Anything for you, my dear.

The races we could have! You would beat me in the open water. You are much faster than I am. If you found the right current, you could swim ahead for days and days before I caught up with you—a small wisp drifting in the background. But I would win among the staggering sea rocks. I am smaller. I can weave into their nooks. Don’t worry though. I won’t let you get lost in the kelp forests. If you would only hold my hand a little bit longer I will lead you through it.

The ocean can be scary if you are alone. So don’t you leave my side. We can grow intertwined like a vine—something we remember only from our days on land. Oh, how we don’t miss them.

So many directions are now at our scaly fingers! Forward and backward. Side to side. Up and down and loop-de-loop and spiraling up and up and up until the shimmering surface appears. Frightened, we will dart back down, hiding our faces beneath the sand.

All I ask is that you don’t leave me.

When we meet the real whale—the flexing steel giant whose heartbeat sends sonar pulses shuddering through the sea floor—hold me and watch as it passes by. Imagine the hundred pairs of feet of the hundred men who left their hundred lovers floundering without them on the shore.

Touch my face. My sea-green face. Your words will be muffled in its wake, but please still speak to me. Tell me about the squid you met. Tell me about the anemones. Tell me you love me. Tell me you always will.

Only don’t leave me to join the hundred men.

Just four days ago we had all summer, all year. We had bright days and nights and all of the gray, misty shadows in between. We had them until the orders came, slipping in at night, turning the morning sky into the shade of red that smolders. The orders that lead to an open sea-bag and laundry done at midnight in a basement while we mumur our goodbyes. Those lonely, lonely goodbyes.

Who am I to hold? Who am I to trust? Who will walk with me through parks, up hills, over bridges and knee-deep into lakes, shimmering in high-sun heat? Can I deny any more that you are leaving me in the morning? How much farther can I escape into this flooded fantasy before I have to say goodbye?

Who will kiss me? There are no lips you can leave behind. Not even to smile quietly, like you do so much.

For as you clamber down the porthole into the musty, borrowed air, my gills will shrivel and disappear. Sinking, drowning, darkening until the only thing you’ve left behind for me to keep of you is one black sock, forgotten and damp on the floor between the washer and the empty dryer.



Missing

Bones the Boston Terrier loves three things: racquetballs, car rides, and you.

Racquetballs because they are just a hair larger than his jaw so by picking it up and running in circles, the ball unpredictably bursts from his teeth and ricochets off any number of your mother’s antique furnishings. A day-long game of fetch at his own personal leisure.

He loves car rides because they take him to the vet. No one quite knows why that is.

He loves you because you are his only. He came to you as a thinly-veiled replacement the year your father left. He was supposed to heal whatever hurt was left over. You were only six, after all. He slept the first night curled up in your crossed legs on the living room floor—perky bat-ears never smoothing down against his neck. Always watching out for you with his one lazy eye.

After dinner, when I visit, while your mother savors her last cigarette of the night—dragon smoke curling viciously from the embers—I sit on the living room floor next to his bed. He pads to my crossed legs and turns around twice before settling himself, my knees like a cradle.

One eye peeks open to ask if this is okay? He cries once. A short, weepy moan.

Of course it’s okay.

He can stay as long as he likes.

I’ll stay still for the next twelve weeks if he’d like.

I think he might miss you—might be the only one who misses you—more than I do.

It’s possible too, that he’s the only one who really listens because we were both left the same way, with the same alarming speed. When Bones rests with me, he knows I know how it is to lose your only. There aren’t many around here who do.

We will both dream that night. I, of black-sand beaches. He, of racquetballs.

We will both wish that you were here to listen to our dreams when we wake.

I would describe the waves, their crystalline water pounding the island. How I could almost smell the air—heavy with rain and flowers. Lying on my back, covered in cloud-white sheets, I’d use my hands, outstretched towards the ceiling, to shape for you the dip of the bay and the mountainside sloping down into it.

He would lick your cheek.

Maybe we miss you both the same.



Bliss

Sometimes I try to make the bed like you do: hospital corners tucked in tight and comforter flat as a plain—but it never looks quite the same. A mellow landscape of wrinkled covers, layered carelessly over one another. As if we had just stood up and left behind the furrowed shadow of our early morning dreamings.

Sometimes, the temptation is too great to resist and so I fall, face first into the empty bed, at last, untroubled.

You are in the smell of cotton. Cotton in summer heat left to dry in the sun. Sheets and sheets of white cotton fabric covering the lawn like a reflection of clouds in the rippling grass.

Our bedsheets are made of the whitest cotton. Cotton that came from somewhere in fields deep down south. Sweet smelling summer snow scattered endlessly down the rows and rows of brown plants. You could run through them for miles and endless miles, never once caring if they ever end. Never noticing the passage of time.

How long has it been now? One month? Two? Three?

Just a few days?

It doesn’t matter. You are still in these sheets, just as strong as before.

These sheets that you are so particular about. These sheets that you must wash yourself—you must do all of your laundry yourself, as if our processes were so different that the outcome would radically alter the state of your universe. These sheets that, after warming in the dryer, you sometimes throw over my shoulders even though they will crease and wrinkle, just because you know how I love their waning heat.

I love them as I love you. In summer, fall, winter, and spring. As a shelter, a comfort, and something to wake up to, smiling. Sweet cotton sheets, caressing bare arms and feet. Cotton sheets that never truly left me.

Lying on the sheets, I do not wish to bring you back, for I know that you are here enough. Here in the room, covering the walls. Here on the mattress, blanketed in white cotton. In the rustle of the curtains and the circle of the ceiling fan as it stirs the stiff midsummer air, drifting in waves through the gaping window.

There, blue-eyed beaming in the picture frame, tethered atop the periscope tower, nothing behind you except Old Glory and the long, stretching miles of wide and endless ocean.



Liberation

I think that children love the feel of uncut grass between their toes because their feet are smooth and without calluses. They can fall on it and roll and barely feel a thing, save for the odd pinecone or sweetgum ball.

I think you love your yard because it is just that: a cushion. When you’re home, if the weather is good, (and sometimes, even if it’s not) you work in the yard. Mowing, edging, trimming, shearing, pruning, and planting. Doing everything you can not to think about your aging dog, your absent father, your ailing mother and her cigarette smoke. All these sharp things in the softness of your emerald lawn.

Everything I plant dies, usually. Once, I grew a sunflower in my backyard only to have a deer pluck and eat it just when I was sure it had reached its full height, its roundest bloom. I think that was the same summer I started running.

My favorite route starts on the street I live on. It’s a dangerous beginning that I only take when you’re gone because you hate how the cars drive too fast for its turns. There is no sidewalk, no buffer between my body and their wheels. Here is where I’m most likely to pull a muscle or twist an ankle on the crumbling asphalt shoulder sometimes just from the shock of a close pass by a mini-van. Luckily, the sidewalk begins just before the stoplight. The cracked, uneven slabs like building blocks laid flat or discarded Domino tiles.

After crossing, the path becomes bright and suburban, winding past big, white mansions with indigo hydrangeas blooming beneath their windows. There’s a lake on the way, with a fountain and fat Canadian geese in the middle—you know the place, the one with Dogwood saplings and park benches. The sidewalk disappears again in front of the college, so that’s where I run on the dirt—where I’ve often slipped down the muddy embankment after rain. I love pushing forward harder just to suck my shoes out of the sodden turf.

Across the bridge and up the longest hill, past more houses and fields, I keep going. Stride after pounding stride. Beneath the power lines, just before the highway overpass is where I usually almost quit. The shrill buzz of electricity cuts through the music on my radio, making me remember the fatigue in my thin, wobbly swimmer’s ankles, the furious thirst that screams down my throat. But I don’t stop, I don’t walk, not even for a step. I sprint down the road past the grocery store—mostly for the exhilaration of hundreds of cars accelerating past me while I take running refuge on the wide, white sidewalks they smoothed a few winters back, when we were still in high school.

I don’t stop either when I hit the first subdivision on the right. I let myself go numb below the hips, forgetting the burn and the exhaustion. My legs stretch farther, the tendons loose and willing, muscles welcoming the extra momentum of the steady downhill. The shade of tall trees over old homes shelters me from the summer heat, creeping closer and closer—as if it were what I was running from. Finally it catches me, overwhelming my body as I turn up the familiar street, right in front of the elementary school where kids practice soccer and tee-ball with their parents at midday.

It leads me to a lawn, grassy and thick—seven miles from my own—where I can strip off my shirt, translucent with sweat, and lay in the cool blades. Where I take down my hair, heavy and wet, and shake it into sticky curls. Where I can catch my breath and laugh shamelessly for a bit before realizing how far I have run, how sunburned my stinging shoulders are, and how long it has been since you crossed my mind.

How happy I am, despite your absence.

It is then, only for a few seconds longer that I can enjoy the brazen light, before remembering your sunless months below the sea. Surrendering to the guilt, the familiar melancholy, I peel myself off your uncut lawn and begin the long, slow jog back home.



Arguing Alone

The memory of our fight is still a loose fire in the engine room, a bursting of pipes. A shearing of sheet metal against rusty iron bolts. All I asked was for total and complete separation. My home is not a submarine. A submarine is not your home.

Jargon. Special words and expressions used by a professional group. Difficult for outsiders to understand.

Maddening. Jargon is maddening.

Now, when we fight, I cannot step into the hall for air. I take deep breaths in the passageway. You brush past me on your way to my kitchen, the galley, for a glass of water.

It’s not unlike the nightmares where you find yourself in immediate danger but cannot scream. Except now, I can scream all I want, but you still won’t hear me—won’t understand. A Kraken springs from the sea floor and devours every word I spit in frustration just so it doesn’t quite reach your ears.

I ask you when was the last time I woke up in a rack and looked out the porthole? Before my last run, did I stretch my port leg and starboard leg? Did I? When I was finished, did I eat some gedunk in the mess? I have never swabbed my hardwood floors. In the early evening, when the skies explode in fantastic displays of lightening and the ground rumbles with thunder, I don’t batten down. I close the windows.

I close the windows, sit on the couch with an old, woven throw, and watch the storm roll through. I make tea and do yoga in the living room.

I do not spend nights alone, pacing the deck, wondering if you are okay. I do not slide down the bulkhead at four in the morning, when my eyes and legs finally surrender to sleep.

No, I don’t. Certainly not.

But I do cry. I do collapse and sob. I do worry about fires and leaks and impenetrable hulls tearing apart like wet tissues. I curse and scream at the storming heavens asking why the hell it has to be so hard.

Why does it?

I could ask you this a hundred times and a thousand times more after that, but you still wouldn’t answer me. Not because you don’t care, but because, I think, we are not always speaking the same language anymore.



Bravery

When we were younger, when we were still new, you asked me what you should do. How could you make this life adrift easier for me? The sincerity in your bright blue eyes glistened like daylight bouncing off cresting waves.

If I were like Rachel, I would have said nothing. I would have told you that everything was perfect, that it would all be fine. Perfectly fine. But that would have been a lie coming from my lips and you know I don’t lie to you.

Rachel would have said that, the girl from my work with long hair the shade of brown that looks like freshly boiled coffee. The kind you brought me home from Kona once, smooth and fragrant. I would have told you not to worry, to write home often, to call when you could. The same words she said to her sailor, her fiancée, when he left on the Reagan.

But I didn’t say that, no. You remember what I said, don’t you? It was after your first month away, when you were training. You called me almost every night from the barracks. The smothering sound of crickets mingling with the distant yelling of another unit’s drill sergeant while you told me about the exercises you preformed, the gushing pipes you learned to patch in the mock engine room—you know, just in case. The sad trumpeting at dusk, a grave reminder.

I would tremble at midnight, terrified by the enormity of what you were doing. I didn’t sleep, drink, or eat. I ran until I fainted in the heat, brutalized by the twisting goodbyes that didn’t seem to have an end. It was only a matter of sunsets and bugle calls until they would come again.

So when you asked me what you could do to make the next time better, I told you that I’d rather not hear from you anymore. Do you remember thinking I was done, that I was leaving you? In your face I saw the same panic, the same sadness I felt every time my phone rang that first month you were gone. Every time the mail came with a letter from that camp. In your voice was the same desperate no more, no more, no more.

Sheepishly, you suggested submarines. Because they are safe, hidden, because they pay well, because the men are relaxed, like you. Because no one yells. Because, most importantly, no one calls or writes or e-mails. They can’t. There isn’t yet a service where letters can be delivered by sea creatures to their intended or stuffed into cork-stopped bottles that shoot up and up and up from the depths until they pop into the sun and bob patiently at the surface until they are read.

Without contact the breaks can be clean, the separations tranquil. Filled with what I imagine happens underway, rather than the reality. The stress of sleeping each night beside cold shells of Tomahawk missiles, biding time with the hundred other men. No, it is much better for us if I don’t think about these things. If I can keep myself as grounded in distractions as possible, it is best.

What’s best is hard though, when Rachel is around. She lives for the letters from her sailor. When they don’t come for a week or two, she flounders, searching for something solid from him to hold onto. She left her family, her sisterhood, her friendships, and her college for this. She left them all for her sailor, for a future that depends on the combined strength of nations, hulls, and marriage.

When letters come, I cannot help but revel with her. I hang onto the lines she reads aloud to me and the rest of our coworkers, the women who sigh and hug her, saying how beautifully she’s handling all of this. How brave, how strong, how lovely she is.

And she is. She handles the news he sends—the good and the bad—with an innate semblance of grace and courage I might never know. Between her nose and her lip there is a tiny scar from the cleft palate she had as a baby—as if she were born for the kind of suffering that leaves its marks, the kind of pain that makes green eyes gently sparkle with whispered sadness, instead of overflowing.

Rachel and I both suffer. But we do it so differently. She is a pearl, a lustrous pearl. When a grain of sand cuts the inside of an oyster it burns. So horribly, that the muscles secrete a shiny necre to cover up the speck, to soothe away the pain. Layer by layer over years and years they keep going, keep healing. What emerges is a single gleaming bead, a little welcomed wonder of beauty, sprung from a heartache.

I think, if I had to pick, I’d say my suffering has made me more like steel—like the hull of your submarine. The shell that flexes and compresses around the hanging decks, sheltering you from the weight of all the ocean just outside. Being away, without your letters, your words, your voice, leaves me cold to the touch, hardened. But the definite separation, the solitude, makes me strong. It keeps me whole. I’m not infallible, but I will curve and bend before I ever break. Before I give in to the crushing pressure, the water, ever darker. Anything for you, my dear. Anything.

Sometimes I still check the mailbox when no one is looking, just to make sure there is nothing waiting there for me, forgotten in the rush of Rachel’s letter. Nothing ever is or ever could be. But that is for the best because, while other women may sigh softly at the beauty of pearls, at their timeless grace, no one has ever built a fortress out of a million tiny gems that bounce and scatter like raindrops when they fall one by one off of a thread.



Last Night

I lost count of the days months ago. It wasn’t on purpose, really. It was just the result of a blustery afternoon and too many hours spent blistering in the July sun. They simply slipped away. Some were swept up by the wind, twisting and spinning until they’d shrunken too far into the sky to be separated from the clouds. A few others were caught in the rain and sucked down storm drains by the steady trickle of runoff. Sometimes children ran through the puddles they left and tracked them in footprints up the street where they lingered for only a minute or two before evaporating, taken back to wherever it was they came from.

The remaining days orbit my fingertips, only appearing in vague mists when someone asks how many days it has been. How many more until you come home?

One.

Less than, if you’re counting by hours, which I was earlier tonight. Now those hours too, have been washed away. Lost to the too-slow ticking of the bedside clock and the too-fast appearance of strange shapes and shadows brought on by the sleeping pill I weakened with too many anxious glasses of water.

I am not worried about tomorrow morning. I know I will try to make the bed nicely, probably a little harder than I tried before. Why it matters I’m not sure, since you’ll fall asleep on the couch before the thought of a bed even crosses your mind. But it will matter.

I know, at breakfast, I will not eat cereal. I will push cereal around the bowl making canals out of Cheerios until there is no point in trying to catch them with a spoon. Before the heat of the day, I will stretch and go for a run. Probably a long distance, but not at too fast a pace. My legs are unpredictable when I’m nervous.

Will they sprint to you when your feet hit the tarmac or will they suddenly drop anchor, leaving me bobbing on the surface of the small crowd gathered, waiting for you to find me instead? Will they confuse each other—the muscles bursting inside with pent-up strength, the joints tempering, hesitant to extend fully, lest they embarrass themselves with too much excitement?

Will they know whom to run to? You all start to look alike after so many weeks sharing the same passageways, the same air.

Will I know whom I’m running to?

You’ve become so unfamiliar to me, so foreign, after weeks living in my imagination instead of my arms. Of course I know you, but which you?

Is it the you that loves, that leaves smiley faces in fog on my bathroom mirror? The you that calls your mother once a week, likes to grill on the deck in the summer, and wants to run a marathon? Will you still be the you that wakes up in the middle of the night and gives back all the sheets you stole in some unconscious, apologetic attempt to make bed-making even harder in the morning? The you I’ve kept alive in some cortex or hemisphere of my brain until the real you finds land in just a handful of hours.

Will your hair be uncut, your chin rough with whiskers? How thin are your lips, again? How blue your eyes? When will you speak in new words and how many times will we fight? I don’t remember anymore, how it feels when someone else’s breathing lulls you to sleep. How their warmth changes the entire room.

I don’t even remember your smile. And this scares me, maybe most of all.

But I will know you again soon. All of your good, and all of your bad.

Whether it is by instinct or by choice, I do not know. Perhaps I was not meant to know such things. But, somehow, I know we will always retrace our steps, going back to where we began. Back to when we stand toe to toe in the almost-dark, drawn to silence by the throbbing of the dryer, the sound of boots marching in an endless line towards the ever-rising sea and all its dark monsters, all its red sunsets.