I'm not quite sure how to even begin. I silenced this blog for the last four months. Autumn simply slipped through my fingers. Five sections of writing classes, six weeks of guests, devouring every last moment with my Nicholas and my Rosalie. Kage, Luka, Kady, Dave, Nick's parents and grandfather - momentum thrusted us into the holiday season with no such remorse. And then, Nick and I relished every moment together. We shopped. We went for long walks with Rosalie. We sipped Mocha Freezes at our new favorite coffee shop on the North Shore. We cuddle beneath the Christmas tree juxaposed to American Horror Story on FX. We slept in. We took naps. We cooked and we baked and we soaked up every last moment together......
And then the weekend before deployment was here. Too quickly. Like cool molassas we waded through last weekend. The days seemed to lag and pass entirely too fast both at once. We established guildlines for the weekend. No cell phones. No meaningless internet browsing. No iPad games. No television, with the exception of bowl games or playoffs, but we could only watch one game so as not to waste our weekend on the couches. And certainly absolutely without hesitation, we were not to speak of Monday. We were not to speak of the year. We were not to acknowledge deployment.
But the blade of truth severed our good intentions on that last rule. Deployment. Goodbye. Monday was ever-present all weekend. Dread gutted us in quiet moments. The anticipation and emotion of the weekend, despite the fact that we truly and sincerely enjoyed each other, was exhausting. My dear friend who endured deployment still too recently, warned of that last day. And, so far, it truly was the hardest. The minutes crept in painful reminder that this was it. This was it until October. It was not quick like the rip of a bandaid. It was like a slow incision without a local anesthesia. And of course, insult to injury, I caught the flu on our last day together! The awful smegma that films the nose and throat with tears was amplified by chills, sneezing, aches and exhaustion.
But Monday came and went. Nick and I, though apart, have hunkered down into our new normal. Fuzzy face time via the 'Tango' app and the sparatic, though frequent!, gchat messaging. Spring 2013 arrived at the college and I truly had no option but to move forward. Class- class class - class. I lived for this weekend, wherein I promised myself that in my new-found free time I will immerse myself in the pages of novels, living another life as a character perhaps in Paris in the 1800s or on the beach of Newport in present day. And, as I promised my mother (hi Mom!), I will reopen the digital pages of my blog and force myself to write and write often.
So here it is: The blog is reopened. Cheers to a new year and to new adventures with Hobbes.
