Sometimes I just feel like typing. Typing my thoughts, my memories, my musings on life...typing the things I don't always want to share with the world. That is me. I've always liked to put a pen to paper, or in this case a finger to a keyboard, and see what happens. This is my life, and whats become of it. This is me, the good, the bad, everything. I'm a worrier, so that will definitely become evident here. Well, here it goes...
From the moment I met my husband, I knew there was something special about him. It wasn't one of those "this is the person I'm going to marry" kind of things, but we clicked. He was walking through the quad at LSU, and I was a freshman in my first semester there. I was eager to meet new people, learn new things, just to experience life on my own. He and his friends were goofing around as I watched them, and I literally laughed out loud at something they did. He overheard, and was obviously pleased I'd noticed how funny they were. So we introduced ourselves. That day, we ventured around the LSU campus, talked, and even visited one of his friend's dorm rooms in the Honors College. We exchanged numbers, and kept in touch infrequently throughout that semester. I was sort-of seeing someone at the time, spending almost every night and weekend with a friend from high school who also came to LSU from Monroe. As fall turned to Winter, we kept in touch, and he went skiing with friends while I took a trip to New York with the BCM. Christmas passed, and my second semester began. We reconnected, and soon were inseparable. I liked him. He and his friends made me feel comfortable, and they made me laugh. We did silly things together...spent hours in the Union at LSU doing crossword puzzles, eating junk food, and throwing noodles at cakes. (An LSU catering truck driver made the mistake of leaving a huge cake unattended in the back of his truck, and since we had leftover noodles from lunch, we decided the cake was a great target.) We quickly grew very close.
That Spring, we made a lot of memories together. Then one day as I walked through the Quad, Jacob called. He was in the Marines, as I knew, and had just found out that he'd be heading to Iraq for a tour of duty. I cried as I walked back to my dorm, worried and confused. We had just begun to really get to know each other, and now he was leaving. The next few weeks we spent every moment possible together. He withdrew from classes, and I skipped a lot of mine to be with him. Our last night together came way too soon, and by that point he was incredibly sleep-deprived from trying to stay up every night to spend time with his friends and family. By this point I'd grown to know and love his family, as we had visited them frequently over the past few months. His mom and I hugged and cried as his bus drove away.
Luckily, I was able to fly out to California to visit Jacob twice while his unit prepared for deployment to Iraq. We spent two lazy weekends walking around the strange town of Palm Springs checking out places called "Gay Mart" and the bum fountain. Those trips flew by, and soon he left the country for Iraq. I told him I loved him, and promised to write all the time.
Unfortunately, life doesn't stand still when you're on the other side of the world, and I soon became involved with my own life, with new friends and adventures. Jacob was always there, in the back of my mind, and we did exchange letters and once in a while I would get a phone call, usually in the middle of the night, from an Unknown number, and it was him. Those talks were short, sometimes awkward, and always sad. He was definitely homesick, and boredom was a huge issue. They often had long expanses of time with nothing serious going on, and I could tell that was killing him. He missed his life and family back home.
After several months of him being away, I took the selfish route. I decided I didnt want to be in a long-distance relationship with someone in Iraq, and I wrote a letter saying I hoped he'd understand. Although I know he didn't, he wrote back and said he agreed.
His deployment finally came to an end, and he returned. The mistakes I'd made in his absence were tough to overcome, and it took a long time for me to get back in good graces with his friends. They knew of my disloyalty, and hated me for it. Honestly, I couldn't blame them. I was young and selfish.
We soon settled back into our former routine of spending the majority of our time together. His friends slowly began to accept me back into their circle, and I was happy. Temporarily, at least.
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