A hot and sunny summer morning, sounds of the city wafting up to the 12th floor window. We lay in bed, he and I, watching the shadows grow shorter as the sun came up behind the buildings. His one hand rested behind his head, the other grasped my hand like it was held fast and forever. As sunlight filtered through the curtains, his skin glowed with a muted beauty, his tattoos looking like artwork brought up from beneath the Vatican. I took one finger and began to trace the outline of one, of the inverted rifle, the battlefield cross, that he had tattooed inside his forearm from elbow to wrist. He sighed deeply then took my fingers and kissed each one. When I looked at his face, he was turned staring out the window, tears caught in the corners of his eyes, silent, watching, holding on to those emotions that he could not afford to let go.
The morning passed by in a similarly silent way, his brooding and sadness too deep to adequately be expressed in words, my misery too large and imposing to put on him when he had such a burden already. In 48 hours, he would be on the ground in a war zone, in Iraq, and nothing would ever feel the same.
Our silence was so loud it roared in our ears, the innuendo of our thoughts making more sound than the traffic below. The emotions that could not be spoken were expressed through the body, the way he tore his nails into my skin trying to hang on, the fierceness of his thrusting and the way he collapsed on top of me, tears streaming down his cheeks. Kissing every tear, gently, working around his eye, I whispered to him, “I love you.”
I was not sure if this was true or not; we had only been seeing each other a few months. But the intensity of the relationship and the circumstances under which it developed, namely the shadow of his deployment with the Army to Iraq, made every moment feel like it had to last forever. It was a unique relationship, a unique way to approach dating, if you could even call it that. It took all of five minutes to go from strangers to lovers.
We met in the back of a moving van, helping mutual friends move their things in together. Assigned the task of moving boxes from the back of the van out to the lawn, we immediately discovered that we worked well together, came up with a system right away and were efficient and organized in doing what needed to be done. He liked that I didn’t whine about lifting heavy boxes; I liked that when he accidentally grazed my left breast with his hands that he said nothing, just looked at me. I looked at his arm and saw that tattoo. The sight of it made me suck in my breath. Only a person who has lost so much would have a tattoo like that, so large and dark and imposing.
He caught me staring. “What? This?” he turned his arm over.
“Yeah, that.” I stammered, feeling clumsy and naïve.
“Do you know what it is?” something in his voice and facial expression challenged me, wanted to know if I could decipher the pain he literally wore on his arm.
“It’s a battlefield cross. How many soldiers did you lose?” I asked, not matter of factly, but with tenderness, with what I hoped was a soft look in my eyes letting him know that it was okay to tell me, that I wouldn’t cringe in horror.
“It was in Fallujah. I lost eleven men in one day.” He hung his head. Throughout the rest of the day, he gave me bits and pieces of the stories of the men’s lives, of those who had been lost. I liked that he was talking about their lives instead of their death, although I know for certain that the manner in which they died haunted him. He’d held several in his arms as they took their dying breath, I would later learn.
When the moving was done and pizza and beer abounded for all the helpers, we lingered near the truck. I let my hand rest on his arm examining the fine detail of the artwork and complementing the artist. “Thanks.” he said, “You know, most people, unless they’re in the military, don’t know what that is.” I felt a little stunned by that; really? I mean, people really didn’t know what that symbolized? “No” he confirmed. “You’re the first civilian I’ve met that knew right off.” At that moment, we were frozen in that kind of time warp moment when you are about to kiss someone for the first time. The birds stop chirping, the wind stops blowing, everything around you fades and all you can see is this person in front of you that has rocked your world.
He kissed me with such force and passion that I almost lost my balance. If I wanted to get to know him more, he was certainly eager for me to know. It was almost like he was physically trying to climb inside me. On that note, we took our visible affection inside and away from the front lawn spectacle that it was becoming, up to his apartment above our friends’ garage.
In the crazy days that followed, I had had to return home to my children and he went back to work. But he called. And he emailed. And text messaged. He told me things like I “invaded his soul” and other things that made me wonder what the hell was happening between us. I knew all about his upcoming deployment and we both actively questioned the design of a universe that throws two people together so violently and passionately only to rip them apart a short time later.
It was difficult to find time together because of the distance and our schedules, his especially. But in every spare moment we had, we somehow managed the distance, sometimes driving seven or eight hours to be together for just one night, knowing that the clock was ticking.
No matter how hard I tried to wish away that day, it arrived anyway. It arrived bringing with it new feelings of despair and hopelessness that hadn’t been there before, the fear that another tour in Iraq would only deepen the pain he already had. As it was, he could not walk well, his spine was missing discs in between several vertebrae; his left side had nerve damage and he frequently twitched, especially in his sleep. One night, his leg twitched so hard he kicked me, the covers flew off and I almost fell out of bed. Usually, sleeping was hard for him, which was why he often drank too much. He was almost always too uncomfortable to sleep, his back in constant pain, his leg and arm twitching and waking him up, his dreams of combat scaring him back into the waking world. On those nights, he would awaken and I could feel him sobbing against my chest as he remembered in vivid detail the day his buddies died. Sometimes he would tell me great stories about their exploits, like super gluing one guy’s ass to the toilet seat, and we would both laugh. But I could see his sadness in telling the stories about his vibrant friends who passed too soon.
When we conversed, he had to have his head turned to the right side, because he was completely deaf in the left ear, a casualty of a grenade explosion. I always remembered to turn his head if I was standing on the wrong side of him, and he showed his pleasure with that by giving me little kisses all around my ears. He didn’t like when people who knew him treated him like he was crazy, by yelling at him to be heard or talking slowly, rather than just accepting his deafness and using his good ear.
On the morning before he left, as I whispered those words in his good ear, “I love you.” something amazing happened. He all-out cried. He cried like I had never seen him cry, like I’d never seen anyone except my children cry, really. It was like he had reached the end of his rope, that he couldn’t take one more thing (and really, this was most likely the truth) and he let it go loudly, violently. When at last he was worn out, he lay across the bed like a deflated balloon, eyes closed, breathing heavily. He had nothing left in him, it seemed. I sat looking at him tenderly, wanting to do something but having nothing to give, except myself. After a pause that felt much longer than it really was, I crawled across the bed and, without a word, put my mouth over the head of his huge, swollen penis and sucked it in. In the midst of all of that, he had managed to work himself into an erection, although I’m not sure how. But I couldn’t bear the thought of him letting it go to waste, of having just one more thing fail him.
His moans were so loud that it seemed to shake the walls. I felt like I was pouring every ounce of energy out of my body an into his, hopefully somehow infusing him with strength to do what he needed to do. Within minutes, he orgasmed forcefully in my mouth, his body writhing, his back arching, forcing him down into my throat and causing me to open myself wider to take him in. If possible, I felt like I would have ripped myself in two to take him in, physically, spiritually, mentally….all of him. He responded by climbing back on top of me, already hard and ready to go again, and by almost literally climbing inside me, moaning my name, asking me to love him. It was one of the saddest, most beautiful moments of my life.
And now he’s gone, deployed for one year. Who knows what will happen in that time? The days sometimes feel like the bottom will drop out when I hear on the news that a bomb went off somewhere near his location, or the phone rings at an odd hour of the night. But I’m sure compared to how he feels, my grief is nothing. How he feels now, I will never really know and what, if anything, any of this meant to him remains a mystery to me.
