It is amazing what time can do... it only takes a second and just like that, your whole world can turn 180 degrees, facing a direction you never thought was possible or never knew existed.
Until last week, I had a plan that I knew in my heart wasn't completely sturdy but in my head was concrete and unbreakable. Of course E would contract with ROTC (soon, rather than later) and I would graduate in May. We would both work hard over the summer, 40+hours each, to pay for an October wedding. But first, we would rent an apartment in Halton Park around August and E would live there while he started school, waiting for me until October. We would be married on the 6th, honeymoon for a week and then come back to enjoy a year and half of life as a married couple. Maybe I would get a full-time PR job, or maybe I would work random shifts doing random things, all the while not caring because we had been given a fresh start and time to finally, finally, finally focus on us.
How silly I feel looking back on that plan. How stupid I must look, to have thought even for a moment that we would get to live a normal life for even five minutes... that we would catch a break that we both felt we deserved. Absolutely stupid.
Last Tuesday changed me so much that I feel like I don't even know who I was before then. It might sound absolutely silly, but it couldn't be more true. In a single second, I found out that E would be deploying in July. In just eight short months, he will be in Afghanistan for at least a year. There will be no ROTC, no October wedding, no year of wedded bliss. He won't get to graduate how he wanted, he won't receive a commission in 2013 and he'll be alone in another country, a dangerous country, without family for a year. The reason doesn't matter, the facts still remain.
In one phone call, all of our dreams just dissipated and we were forced to form a new plan. E has been so positive about it, and that makes me so proud of him. I feel like I, too, should be positive but right now it seems a struggle just to not cry as soon as I remember that he's going to deploy. He wants to get married before he leaves, and I do too. Is that selfish? I can't tell. I can't decide if the things I want are selfish or if they're smart. I don't know the difference anymore, really. Is it bad that we want to benefit from the deployment financially as much as possible? Is that taking advantage of the system? Am I using him, is he using me? Does it matter when we marry if we were planning to do it anyway? I just don't know. I also know that I can't ask these questions to just anyone because not just anyone will understand. If I have learned anything this past week, it is that the majority of civilians and those who aren't directly affected by someone in the military will NOT, under any circumstance, understand or begin to understand a damn thing you are dealing with.
The people who you thought were your best friends will disappoint you. And it isn't their fault. They honestly have no way of knowing what to say, or how you're feeling or the realities that you are dealing with. They will watch the news, listen to your stories and they will think that they have formulated some kind of idea but you will not be fooled; they are clueless.
And you will, in turn, become out of tune to them. And that isn't your fault either. All of a sudden, when I listen to someone's problems about dating or school, or "OMG I might not make a 100, i'll have to settle for a 99.9," I get the urge to hurl a chair into the air and watch it fall, miserably on top of what ever problem said person seemed to have and then walk away saying, "Well, on top of all that, you now have a broken chair." Childish? Probably. But I just can't find myself to sympathize anymore.
For awhile I've felt like I was just drifting away from most of my friends. They would make comments about my "rushing" growing up and I would just sit back and laugh... rushing? How have I rushed anything? I excelled in school so I'm graduating a year early. Did I rush it? Not really. I fell in love at 16 and never, ever fell out of it... yet I'm "rushing" a marriage? We've been together, cumulatively, for five years! How slow should we be going?
And now, when I hear about their problems that seem so trivial compared to the thought of E's looming deployment, I just get irritated. I'm trying so hard to put it into perspective, to not be a bad guy in all of this. But how could I possibly feel sorry that you might get a B+ on your 40 page paper when E is about to go and possibly be shot at for an entire year? Your problems just don't seem so bad, and I have a hard time feeling anything towards you.
I feel so caught in this awkward limbo of childhood and adulthood. Most of my friends are a year+ away from graduating, barely maintain a relationship for longer than 6 months (if that) and still have everything handed to them from mommy and daddy. I'm about to be a married woman, graduating from college and trying to enter the workforce. What, if anything, do we even have in common? Perhaps this is just emotions running high right now. This is me, over analyzing everything and being entirely too dramatic for my own good. Except this doesn't seem like a drama anymore. This seems like reality grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me, trying to wake me up from this daze I've allowed myself to be consumed in for months.
In the meantime, I will have to just deal with it. I will have to deal with friends who don't really know how to support me in this (And how the heck could I expect them to when I have no idea how to do myself?), I will have to plan a wedding in six months, I will have to stay strong for Ethan because he has to be scared, too. I don't know how it'll work but I know that it will work. It has to, right?
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