WHEN THE WAR IS OVER…😒

I had been reading my pile of saved letters nonstop. The envelopes were of various sizes and colors, but all were worn, softened, and wrinkled. I carried them with me from my bedroom drawer, laid them on my kitchen table.

He had just called and stirred up all sorts of emotion. He was hungover, driving back to the camp after an alleged weekend of vigorous training. And he was calling me, what, to kill time on his way back? I had sent him an email a few days earlier, asking how his last days of training were going, odds and ends, just loose chatter. And so he told me he’d gotten my email and was sorry that he hadn’t gotten a chance to write back, that he’d been really busy. But that he’d been thinking about me…wonderful

He could always do that so well. Turn a miserable conversation into unveiled flirtation.

We never really had what might be considered a normal conversation. In the twelve months that Luke and I were “together” he was deployed in Somalia for six of them, in two three-month training; the other six months we lived in different towns. We saw each other twelve times, including the day we met. We spoke, face timed and emailed often, nearly every day when he was in town, and with surprising frequency, too, when he was deployed, via the army’s satellite phones and computers.

So, have you gotten your life together yet, or are you still trying this writing thing?

Oh, you know, I’m just waiting for a man to marry me. . . .

What a guy that’s gonna be!

And we laughed. It was an old joke. I could hear his wry smile over the phone. His voice was strong. He put me at ease. But realizing my comfort with him made me nervous, too, to be like this again with him, after so much time and yet feeling like it had been no time at all. I stumbled over my words. My voice wavered, quickened. We laughed again. I recovered, and my voice steadied.

After I’d hung up the phone with Luke, the silence was suffocating. I sat on the arm of the couch, holding the phone, staring down at it, replaying our conversation in my mind. Sifting through my conflicted feelings. I had planned to spend the rest of the afternoon sleeping after my night shift job, but instead I was perusing these letters again. I spread out all the envelopes in front of me. I would re-read over and over. He wrote to me from war that he loved me. But did he love me or some idea of me? Our relationship was marked by an urgency and intensity that were ignited from the first meeting, the knowledge that he was going away to war. He wrote about our future together after having known me for three months. Did he accelerate our dating because, surrounded by death, he felt life’s urgency? And was I quick to write I love you, because, I reasoned: What was the harm? Right?

Part of the sadness of rereading and looking at the stack of letters in front of me came from the fact that I hardly wrote to him, and he was so diligent in writing to me. How could I have been too busy to write more?

I rested into the back of my chair and studied one of the letters, two pages long, white-lined. Nothing had been crossed out and rewritten. He wrote the words as they came to him, and I was struck by the letter’s honest fluidity. Luke s grammar was questionable, urgent, but his spelling was perfect, he wrote about trials of a young soldier back home from war, celebrating the greatness of the very country he was risking his life to defend. Who was I to tell him, enough? He reminded me of the good time, we would have when he came home soon, to celebrate a milestone: - marriage.

 I blacked out that evening. Woke up alone in bed, fully clothed. My last memory of the night was stumbling toward my bed, holding my love letters in one hand, alcohol in the other… How did I look now? Embarrassed at how drunk I must have been the night before, judging by the intensity of my hangover and my lack of memory, I remembered that I called Luke and wanted desperately to remember details. I buried myself under the covers, at least for a few more hours, until I might be able to think more clearly.

I next woke when Luke called me, I’m so sorry, he said after informing me that he was coming home earlier than planned, War was over! Change of plans, including a welcome party for him and his military friends.

We met for barbecue at his family house later that month. That’s when I saw her again, smiling face to face with Luke while she swigged her beer like a pro. She wore a black sleeveless dress, with strings of costume pearls cascading into her deep neckline and a military jacket hung on her swagy legs. She wasn’t stunning, but a man like Luke would find her reassuringly feminine. Her eyes followed him across the room as he halted in front of me, a quick peck and reassuring hug is all I got, after lonely months of waiting! ‘You are sleeping with that bitch again Luke?’ I whispered pretending to block the tears threatening to ruin my façade.  ‘Hell no Babe’, he said with fake charisma, ‘she is my colleague and a good friend as I have already told you…’

I linked arms with Luke, incapable of being seen apart from him, aware and disgusted at myself for acting this way. And yet I was guiltily unable to stop myself. Fueled by what I perceived as his interest in her. Her keen, innocent interest in his deployments with the army confronted me with my own failings of interest in the matter, of late having abandoned the topic with Luke, our views so increasingly irreconcilable.

With her, he seemed so happy. And perhaps that’s what stung the most. And for a moment, a solitary moment of selfless non-competition, I wished for them to be together. I knew that Luke and I were not right for each other, that my interest in him was now only competitive in the face of his desire for this other woman. I wanted him to pick me over her, her with whom he was so smitten right in front of me, and yet I was unwilling to make amends, to make him love me more, to make myself the woman who would make him never look at someone like her, someone as easy and predictable as her, a military woman.

I disentangled myself from his arm slowly watching them. They gravitated toward each other immediately after I left his side, as I sipped my red wine, clenched and unclenched my jaw, amid feigned smiles and continued nods to the guests with whom I was seemingly engaged in conversation. And how they laughed! Full-bodied laughs. And not a look from Luke in my direction. To see where I might be. Not one.

And I knew then that the other woman won.