For a year I wore blinders. I did my absolute best daily to control what I saw, heard, over-heard, and put myself into. In a world that craved an eye on the terrors of the war, gushed and awed at the thought of another soldier dead, in a culture where video games allowed one to act as if there were in the battle field, and movies that glorified death to a disturbing degree it wasn’t always easy to keep my blinders in place. Yet that is the role I took for a year while my love was away.
I recently heard a story on NHPR about a group of women and families that were interviewed about their personal experiences while their husbands served our country. I recall one woman stating that she engineered her computer to alter her to any new updates pr news articles about the area in which her husband was stationed. I was astonished to hear this. When Ray and I were separated by oceans and deserts even the thought of hear about this or that explosion sent chills throughout my body. In the moments that I somehow would stumbled across news of a fallen soldier I never could hold back the tears. It was always a guilty mixture of “thank God it wasn’t Ray “to an overwhelming blow of “that could have been him”.
There would be days when I would hear nothing from Ray. It was all that I could do to carry on with daily life without fear creeping its way into my every breath. Even on the days I would get to actually hear his voice through the creaky connection the moment we he had to hang up I would sit there still listening to the dial tone wondering when I would hear it again. In fact to this day almost 4 years later I still haven’t the heart or desire to erase the 13 message he left on my phone in the year he was gone.
It is haunting the way you drift when the person you love might never been seen again. For me it felt excruciating that I might never get to fully enjoy the love that Ray and I had, as we had only courted for 16 days prior to his departure. Thankfully for me, for us no matter how long it went between our correspondences there was always another.
