Part Five: The End of Endings.

Our plans were set in motion. I believed, I was lead to believe, that if I just held out a little longer, just waited a few more months, those plans would turn into the life I lived.
We talked. I helped him write his grocery list over the phone and he helped me with the causes of war. He told me he missed me, that he was tired all the time and that he missed me. I held on to his secrets. I thought about every moment we had spent together, they were the last thing I thought of before drifting to sleep. He told me he’d do everything he could in a few months to move closer to me. It was exactly what I wanted to hear.

“Darlin’,” he said to me on the phone one night, “I miss you. I’m coming to see you. Just one more week.” We agreed we’d be alone without each other. I told him that I didn’t need anyone else. That I didn’t want anyone else. I told him I was flying solo without him and he said he was the same without me. He asked me to not make promises that I didn’t intend to keep. I promised that I wouldn’t hurt him. I tried to reassure him. “Okay,” he said, “One week, darlin’.”

And then nothing.

My life then became something like a sweater. Slowly, it was being unraveled all around me but by the time I finally noticed, the sweater was in shambles.

I can’t pinpoint the moment when I realized he wasn’t coming to San Francisco. But I knew that every day I woke up more depressed and broken than the day before because it was one more day of silence. I couldn’t call him. I felt taken advantage of. I didn’t have any real answers, anything tangible I could explain to anyone. I had nothing but a memory. Like cigarette smoke; now you see it, now you don’t; only a cigarette butt to prove anything was there in the first place.
There was nothing left but questions: what about our plans? What about what I wanted? What was I supposed to do now? I had put him first. I had explained to my friends that I was waiting for someone. I believed that there would be a future. I just looked like a fool. There was nothing. No phone calls, no letters, no explanations, texts, apologies, nothing.

Even without an explanation, I knew where he went, who he went to. Perhaps it would have been better to hear it from the horse’s mouth, but why ask when you know the answer? He went back to her. She was safe, a girl who would wait. She hadn’t given anything to anyone else, she had proved herself. She was undamaged, innocent, familiar. I had been replaced. It didn’t matter what I felt. It didn’t seem fair and it didn’t seem right, but that is what it was.
Eventually, he may become bored again. His mind might wander to me. He might ask himself what if? Maybe he’ll think about the times we had that summer in the heat and smoke. Eventually, I’ll get tired of waking up every morning sad and disappointed. I would be happy again. When I decided that, someone new would walk in.

Until then, I had to live my life. When I finally did settled in to my old life, I still didn’t feel like me. It was as if I had walked out of a hurricane, barely alive, but a hurricane everyone else had missed. All my friends, they had little or no idea of what happened. They hadn’t seen me cry myself to sleep or heard the sound of his voice when he told me all those things I wanted to hear. I guess you could say I was back from a war, trying to assimilate back into the same old life as a different person. Just like him. Everything and everyone else was the same, why wasn’t I? That hurricane, that war, beat me up and broke me down, but I had no one to turn to who had experienced it like I did. I didn’t even have him. There was nothing I could do but try to be happy, try to be normal.

My friends told me I wasn’t the same. They expressed their concerns, “You’re not as funny anymore. You don’t laugh as much. What happened?” I struggled to find the words to tell them. But how do you compact three months of love and sadness into a few sentences? How does a woman put everything she is into an envelope and send it through the mail? How does someone say goodbye to the person they love, perhaps for the last time? How does one break another’s heart? I didn’t have answers for any of my questions, let alone theirs.

Instead of answering, I shrugged it off. I resented them. My friends had a wonderful summer running through the city, having adventures, while I worked in the sun and let someone break my heart every way they could. I was angry and so I retreated into myself further. I became the part of him that I detested most; the part that couldn’t be reached, whose spark was gone. Sometimes I would lie in bed reliving everything that had happened this summer. I would dream about him, but with a happy ending. I would dream of him telling me everything was ok, that he was there for me. I could almost feel him there. I wouldn’t get out of bed, I would just hit snooze over and over until the day could wait no more. I still loved him; that much was clear. But it was all over and I couldn’t go back.

One day I did wake up. I woke up from the sadness, the exhaustion, the hurt. The storm had passed, the war was over. Everything heavy on my shoulders was lifted up, every wound I had inside me closed. I felt remarkably whole again. Alive again, I could move on with my life. I made more friends. Friends that had no idea of who he was and wouldn’t ever unless I chose to tell them, which I would, eventually. I would tell them that this past summer I fell in love with someone who wasn’t able to love me back. That I had planned a future, that I had planned my life around someone who did not offer me the same courtesy. I had found my person; my everything. But it ended. I had unknowingly been a rebound but now I knew better. Sometimes, things fall apart.

Now he was someone else’s everything and I had everything I wanted ready for me in San Francisco. My life was there, all I had to do was live it. Their paths were predetermined, I was just the distraction in their long road to a happily ever after. A bump, if you will. In the story of his life, I will be reduced to a hushed rumor, an interruption in their otherwise perfect romance. We will be cordial at Thanksgiving and Christmas, when I am back in the Valley, but I won’t ever be back for another summer and she will probably always resent me.

In the story of my life, he will be remembered as the first person I gave my whole heart to, the summer romance that crashed and burned, a lesson I will pass on to friends and daughters. He will be the person I think back to when my mind is empty and calm, or when I meet the person I will spend the rest of my life with, someone I cannot ever forget. It may not be perfect, and it may not be what I wanted, but that is what it is.

Part Four

It was in the heat of summer that everything started to fall apart with him. We had spent more time together, driving around in his Jeep, watching kids play in the grass at night, and lying on his couch. But he started to drift away. It is hard to explain, but something in him turned off. His spark was gone. He stopped making jokes and spent most of his time alone. It was a mistake I had made. Somewhere along the line I had messed up without giving him everything he wanted. Or maybe he was just falling into his own world of sadness that had little to do with me. That was another mistake I had made. I believed his battle scars to be romantic, but I was naïve for thinking that. His sister just shook her head with her hands in the air and said, “I don’t know what to do.” I could love him and I could listen to him but that wouldn’t always make him better. Eventually he would come out of his depression. Eventually, he would sink back in. “He is like night and day,” his sister told me. All I could do was nod in agreement. Even though he was home from the war, he was still fighting one, but this time it only existed inside his head. I gave him his space. I took a step back to give him some breathing room. I had faith that he would come back to me.

He was different than anyone I had ever loved before. But I suppose I hadn’t really loved anyone before, and so he stood out among the likes and the almosts. He was different because he wasn’t much taller than me. He was different because he wasn’t in college. He was different because he was brilliant, even if he didn’t know it. He was different, but he was just like me. We both loved reading; it was one of the first things we ever talked in depth about. He absorbed everything he read, swallowing words and ideas whole. He made jokes at times that other’s deemed inappropriate and I deemed hilarious. He loved history and finding out how things were made and created and worked. We spoke the same. We hide our emotions in the same ways. He was everything I had ever thought I wanted rolled together into one man. He wasn’t mine, but he was everything.

There was always something with the girl who waited. Who is waiting. Even in those moments where I was so happy I could fall to pieces, I knew she was always waiting. Her patience was always in the back of my mind. I knew when I would have to leave come fall, she would be there for him to spend his time with. Someone he could make laugh and someone he could lie with and tell secrets to. I would be replaced as soon as the breeze turned crisp and the leaves started to fall. She just had to bide her time.

She wasn’t like me. We weren’t even in the same category. She was blonde, I was a brunette. She waited and I would move on. Sometimes, I would find myself looking at the pictures she kept of them online. I would look at their faces and see the smile he had given to me that he had also given to her. I could feel how happy they had been because it was as happy as I was, even if that happiness was fleeting.

I knew how this story would end before it had been written. I was his distraction; someone to play with, to talk to, to lie with, while deciding that the other girl was the one for him. I didn’t want to fight her for him. I knew the ending would never change, that I would be sending myself into a battle that I would ultimately lose. I could use all the firepower, all the strategy and planning I wanted, but I would lose. I might have been doing it out of spite, but I loved him, so I hung on with everything I had.

I would never recommend this way of living to anyone. It is pathetic, really, to hold out for a man who may or may not love you in the same way you do him. I didn’t give up, even though I probably should have. I was lead to believe we had a future. I was lead to believe that neither one of us wanted this to be over and so it wouldn’t be. That fall we’d both try, even though we’d both be busy with our lives apart from one another. Maybe he had every intention of putting his heart into our unfortunate circumstance. But I was different from her in that there was no guarantee that I would wait and that I would limit my social circle to the friends I already had. I was not a safe bet to him. I had already given what I had to him and a few others, what would stop me from forgetting him and moving on to someone else? I had never said those three little words, but then again, neither did he.

All these things are just speculation. I don’t know what he was afraid of, if anything. He couldn’t articulate them to me. We suffered in silence. True feelings were still the hardest part of a solider to figure out. If I became aware of his inability to communicate fears or feelings in those last few days, I pushed them to the back of my mind. He’s just pensive, quiet. It’s his way.

Those three little words could have kept me in the Central Valley. I would have made it work. Those three little words might have brought him into my life in San Francisco. It would be an adjustment, but I could make him fit. But those words weren’t ever exchanged. I packed up the car and he never stopped me.

While I was heading back to San Francisco, there was a deep sadness in me. All that hurt, all the sadness and confusion and passion stretched out before me, covering the farmlands and coastal mountains that would serve as a barrier between him and I. When I came through the tunnel on the Bay Bridge, I should have been filled with happiness or relief to be coming home to the life I had made for myself there. But there was a hole where my heart should have been, sucking any ounce of happiness I could have felt into it, drowning me in sorrow. Everything ached. Even though I should have been thrilled to see that sweeping city landscape, all I felt was that I had left everything behind. He was everything to me and I left because I wasn’t sure if he was ready to love me back. I missed him more with every mile we traveled into the heart of the city.

Part Three.

One night that summer, we were sitting on his couch, shooting the shit. We had both had a few beers, but nothing too exciting. We had been flirting, touching, you know, all the things two people do when there is a spark in the air. We were sitting on the couch and his arm was around me. His sister and her boyfriend, who he lived with, had already gone to bed. We joked that this might be inappropriate, since he was my best friend’s brother. We joked, but we kept pushing the envelope farther; my head on his shoulder, his hand on my knee. Then I looked up and he kissed me and I couldn’t stop myself. I kissed him back. It was probably wrong, but it felt right, so we kept going until I pushed him off of me even though I wanted nothing more than to feel the weight of his body on top of mine. We joked. He smiled and reached out and again, I couldn’t stop myself. He said all the things I wanted to hear, all the things a man will say to a woman just because he wants her. I knew I shouldn’t, but I believed them.
That night we didn’t do anything we weren’t supposed to do. I mean, we didn’t do that. I felt like we deserved more than a drunk roll in the hay after a game of ladder ball. That night wasn’t the night for that. I also felt like I owed my best friend more than a half assed excuse about why I was still there in the morning and why I was wearing her brother’s clothes.
He told me everything I wanted to hear. He told me that he had wanted this since we met, that I was brilliant, and beautiful, and all those wonderful adjectives. He told me about his problems and he wouldn’t let my hand go. I hovered over him and stroked his forehead and he wouldn’t let my hand go. He told me if he was going to fall in love with someone, they had the right to know all of this. So I listened to his secrets. There, in the dark, all those feelings he isn’t supposed to have bubbled up and I listened to all the hurt and sadness that came out. Those secrets aren’t mine to tell, but, now I have them, too. That night I listened to his heart beat with my head on his chest and was overwhelmed with how real all this was. This was a man I wanted to fall in love with, someone who I could be with, who seemed like he felt the same about me. I let myself be happy. For those brief hours between sunset and sunrise, with our foreheads touching and my hand in his, I let myself be happy.

My best friend believes in love. She believes in the fairy tale, happily ever after, the real deal. She is confident that if you don’t settle, if you keep looking and keep hoping, you’ll find your happy ending. I told her I’m too cynical for that and I’ll probably settle for someone I know isn’t the one. I’d been replaced and taken advantage of and deceived too many time before, I explained to her. She told me to never give up. What I didn’t tell her is that I found the person that I want to spend the rest of my life with. That I think I’ve found my one and only, the person who makes me whole. The problem is that he’s her brother. He’s damaged. He isn’t sure that he is ready. There are a lot of problems with the situation and still I carry on. I don’t know if she believes in fighting for love, I just know that she believes in waiting for it. So I tell her I am waiting and I don’t tell her anything else.
When I think about that kind of love, I think about the girl who sent him care packages. She loved him. She still loves him. Sometimes I’d find myself looking at pictures of them. It felt wrong, like I was spying, or cheating the game. But I looked anyway. Mostly, it felt like a kick in the stomach, so I don’t know why I’d look week after week. It was like she was defending their past by laying it out so easily for me, or any other girl, to find. Like she was trying to show everyone that they were happy once by leaving up pictures of their smiling faces together. I knew they had been happy. I also knew that they thought about staying together forever and that she loved him more than anything. But, he ended all of that. She had believed that her search for her one and only was over and that it was only a matter of time before there was a ring on her finger. She just had to wait a little longer, patiently stand beside him as he sorted through everything that was stalling him. Then he tore the rug out from under her.
I think she still hangs on, maybe through those pictures. But I suppose she has every right to. She was the one who waited for him, who prayed for his safety. I just hoped. But what good is wishful thinking next to love and prayer?

If there is something certain about the Central Valley in summertime it is the heat. “But it’s a dry heat!” people will say in defense of the weather. Dry it is. The air becomes so arid that one can taste the dust being blown off acres of farmland, drying out crops and grass and weeds alike. One step out the door and sweat starts to bead at the temples. A few steps more and it begins to drip. The only part of summer here that is conducive to romance may be the evenings. Once the sun begins to set, the Delta Breeze comes drifting in, drawing people outside for walks, for barbeques, to leisurely lie in the grass and watch the sky turn.
My job that summer required me to walk outside in the late afternoon for hours when the rays of the sun were at their strongest. My tolerance of the heat grew with every freckle that appeared on my neck, shoulders, and back. Therein lays my favorite part of summertime: the freckles splattered all over my body. There was not a part of me left unmarked. From my fingers to my toes, I was covered and I loved it. Every day there would be more. Maybe they were a metaphor for something I didn’t quite understand, because as soon as I returned to that foggy home of mine, they would fade away. Come winter, there would only be hint of what was.
That summer in the Central Valley was also filled with smoke. It poured in from the thousands of wildfires that burned and consumed everything that surrounded the valley. The fires themselves were not new; residents had become accustomed to the red flag warnings put out every morning. But that summer the smoke was thicker, the fires burning closer and more ferociously than ever before. Hardly anyone could breathe outside, let alone work, without a wet rag tied over their mouth and nose. It hung in the air like a fog even when the temperatures climbed well over 100 degrees. It was all bad. At sunset, the sky itself looked as if it was on fire. Magnificent as it was, it was a bad sign of more fires to come. The smoke sat for weeks until the Delta Breeze came back and washed it away, relieving all, calling the residents outside again to play.

Part Two.

War changes everyone and everything it touches, and even some things and people it doesn’t. It moves borders and changes the faces on currency and the colors on a flag. It encourages some people to be brave and some people to be cowards. It brings out human kind’s best qualities and their worst. I was fifteen when the war started and twenty when he came home. I had read and watched a lot about this war by then. Maybe it was because in California we were so unscathed and I felt like I had to touch it somehow. We made no great sacrifice, few of our sons and daughters were in harm’s way, and this wasn’t a war for leftists and liberals. It was for patriots and Texans, people I didn’t know. But I followed it. I followed it from KBR to Colby Buzzell to 4,000 American soldiers dead. Maybe I used this war to escape the one in my head or the one in my living room, and kitchen, and dining room and every other room that was sheltered in my parent’s home. It’s easier to watch someone else’s war than to fight your own, I realized.

That May I was tired of school and of fog. I had spent the last summer in the city chasing scraps of sunshine and sitting on the couch with my roommate watching reality TV. I came home that May for a new job, to spend time with my family, to save money that I would have been spending on shit I didn’t need. The week I got back I headed over to my best friend’s house, his sister’s, and I met him, finally. I also met her, the girl with the care packages and her heart on her sleeve. The four of us went to dinner in his open Jeep. We talked about history and made fun of our waiter and I swore too much, like always. He didn’t sit next to her at the movie later. He wouldn’t, even though she pleaded a little. The next day his sister told me he had broken up with her and I felt a guiltless satisfaction in the center of my chest. That was the moment when I finally allowed myself to hope, even if it was just for a moment. I hoped that everything would fall into place and we would fall in love.

In the love story that takes place in my head, a soldier sits in his fox hole at night, reading and re-reading letters from his girl back home. She waits patiently and he tries not to die. He looks up through the rain and shell fire and sees her face looking back at him through the clouds of fog or smoke and that gives him hope and keeps him alive. Maybe I am more of a romantic than I give myself credit for. Anyway, this was a different kind of war. This war was in dust and dirt and enemies rigging car bombs without wearing their country’s uniform. Most of us, somewhere across a continent and an ocean and a world away, didn’t pay attention. We kept having birthday parties and eating cake, we kept driving from coast to coast, from home to work, pausing maybe every once and a while to listen to the President, or a General, or a body count. But more often then not, we didn’t pause at all. No one told us to give or sacrifice for the war effort because mostly, at least where I lived, we didn’t think we should be at war and so we didn’t think we should give to war. I didn’t think we should be sending boys off to the desert, just to drive around and wait to die. At least that’s what I read and heard it as, but then, what did I know about war?

I learned a lot about this war from him in a short amount of time. I learned that no matter how many books I read or documentaries I watched, nothing broke my heart more than listening to him tell his stories. Sitting in my back yard one night, everything dimly lit by a small lantern, listening to his stories, my brain fought every muscle in my body. It took everything I had to stop myself from rushing over, from sitting knee to knee with him, from holding his hand. I didn’t do any of that, though. I listened patiently and watched his expressions. He told me his stories without flinching, like he was telling me about a camping trip or a conversation with his father. He acted nonchalant, but all I saw was hurt. All I wanted to do was touch him, to hold his face in my hands, but I held back.

The way he spoke about it all reminded me of myself. Like me telling stories about my family, how crazy or dysfunctional we all were. I talked about my brother going to rehab like it was a day at the mall. The really bad stuff, the stuff I tried to forget, I didn’t talk about ever. But here was someone speaking like I speak and maybe there were things he didn’t tell me, too. We told stories the same, we kept it all bottled up the same. His stories aren’t mine to tell, but they’re in me now, too. Maybe that is why either of said anything at all, to lessen some of the pressure that had been built up inside us. If we didn’t ease up on it a little every now and then, one of us might explode.

Part One.

Somewhere in the Central Valley of California there is a soldier with my name on his heart.

I knew everything about him before I met him. His sister is my best friend and she told me just about everything. Why he quit school, why he signed up for the Army, where he was and when he was coming home. So I knew everything about him except how he felt, which is the hardest thing to find out about a soldier. From what I know, from what I’ve discovered, those important feelings only bubble up to the surface at night, when you are lying side by side, with one hand stroking his forehead and the other being held tightly by his. Those feelings go away in the light of day. They disappear, like dew from a flower. But that was always ok with me.

I had always surrounded myself with war; I read and watched it and I could leave whenever I wanted. But he lived and breathed it. He carried a weapon and he carried his fear, I just carried a book and carried on. I carried on to my malls and to my classes; he carried himself into his Humvee and waited to die. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right, but that’s what it was.

When those emotions bubbled up, they hung between us like fog. I tried to scoop them up and move them to somewhere he wouldn’t see but they were always there. I tried my best, but they never went away.

Sometimes I tried to imagine him over there while I sat and read the paper and drank coffee in the morning. I tried to imagine him as one of the nameless soldiers that had been deployed, doing their duty, driving their Humvees. But I couldn’t really see him there. I could look at all the pictures and listen to all the stories, but that was all before I really knew him. Before I had heard his voice and before he looked me in the eye, but right around the time that I decided I was going to fall in love with him.

When men write about war, they almost always write something about women. They write about the women they fucked, the women they want to fuck, the women they should have or could have fucked and didn’t. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. Many times, they write about the women that have fucked them over, and their buddies, too. One of them gets a letter, a phone call, an email, “I love you, but, there is someone else.” There’s always someone else. Sometimes, they write about the women they love or the women that love them and who they wish didn’t or the women they wish would. There is always mention of women.

Sometimes, women have short attention spans for men. They need someone to hold them right now, someone to kiss them right now, and someone to love them right now. Other kinds of women can hold out until the war is over. They send letters, care packages, some or all of themselves compressed into envelops with a soldier’s name on the front. These women are waiting for the war to just be over, already. They don’t care about the politics, the logistics, or a general’s empty exit strategy. They’re just waiting for their man to come home.

Sometimes, they’re waiting for marriage and a soldier may come home, only to be left unsatisfied. That soldier may have to wait two, three, or four years more to remember how exactly a woman feels, with only his hand and his imagination to keep him company. But that is the price a soldier pays for the love of his life, right?

In my opinion, it’s best to just move on. But then, I’ve never been much of a romantic. Like I said, I’ve always surrounded myself with war. Or at least stories about it. I’ve been reading books about the Holocaust since I was old enough to understand what it was. I’ve read O’Brien, Trumbo, Swofford, Vonnegut; I’ve seen Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket, and Band of Brothers. I’ve poured over Newsweek and Time, Winter Soldier, and Frank Kaplan’s “War Stories”. Maybe the romance of war has always excited me more than any love story ever could. I’ve never been interested in the grand gesture, the pebbles on my window at night. Never hoped Prince Charming would come to rescue me. I’ve never really needed to be rescued, just needed someone to escape with. Maybe that is what drew me to him in the first place; we were both trying to escape out of our own heads, same time, different places.

That’s how we started talking, see? His sister, my best friend, suggested it. She said we should talk because we were both so unhappy about where we were. Except my unhappiness was a consequence of self-indulgence and a confused identity, his was a casualty of war. One conversation about life and death later and I couldn’t stop waiting for his name to show up on the right hand side of my computer screen. This is all very un-romantic, this computer screen business, but he was half a world away and letters are just too slow. So, that is how I started to love him, through the clack of a key board. It’s silly, it’s embarrassing, but, that’s what it was.
He told me stories about war. About driving and waiting to die. But mostly we talked about drinking and missed opportunities and books we’d read. I wasn’t hopeless or hopeful even; I was just there, another correspondent. Perhaps I held on to some small hope that he’d come visit me at school when he got out, I guess that was my idea of a grand gesture, but he didn’t. He got back together with the girl who sent care packages, who sent all of herself, who is holding out for marriage, and who had her whole family greet him at the airport with signs and balloons. She was sweet, blonde, and loved him, and I wasn’t there. At least until I was.