I Love You With All My Freedom
A Military Wife's Promise
I see you my love but I can’t feel you. You are here with me and yet far away. The war is over but your battle has just begun. You engraved your name on the dotted line. After twenty-one years of service, you have honorably exited the military, shedding a uniform that had shaped every angle of the man you are now. You have now stepped into a world of an unfamiliar culture and are seemingly forced to fight for an existence that many may never understand.
I sense you my love but I can’t hear you. I listen to your words intently but at the same time, you aren’t saying anything at all. Our conversations are limited to the ease that you have set for yourself and this life with us. Our sons and I yearn for deep conversations with you. But how can we connect if the oceans of your experiences are too rough to travel through? I also reflect on the fact that we have never traveled where you have gone nor have seen what you have; a part of your life I’m glad to be apart from but somehow wish I was still a part of.
I watch how you move my love but I know you don’t realize it. I see the way you struggle to be present but your eyes give it away. The way you look beyond the moment and into a world, a world where we only exist as a reason you decided to fight. A part of you is there and the part of you is here. At this point, I’ll take any part of you that you lay before me. I trust that it will eventually lead to deeper structures where we can start to unravel its layers.
I can trail your anger briefly when you don’t realize that you’ve allowed it to penetrate the moment. A slip of your emotions can arise when a familiar song plays or a picture surfaces. You fight back tears for the brothers you lost and pack away the anger triggered by such a great loss. I want to be there for you but the hardness that helped you survive the war marks its territory within your soul. You keep me out, somehow I believe it is to protect me from the unbearable pain you feel; a pain that is so sacred to you. You have earned that right my love, to keep it for yourself.
I hear you pray at night, but don’t you know that I plead to God at the same time? Do you think that God has forsaken you in the midst of your struggle because of the war you were called to fight? If you could only see yourself through the eyes of all of those who love you, you are far from the evil you believe yourself to be. I trust with everything in my being, that you have a spot in the fields of eternal life and I pray you to see that. Ahhh, the fields of eternal life, where the breeze gently billows with the breaths of every soldier who has ever laid down his gun eternally.
I am here. You are here. I am home with you. You are home to me. Wherever your mind sends you, I will still be here. When your words are barely a conversation, I will listen to your silence. And if there is ever a day that barrels down the sounds of war, I will wage a bigger battle to uphold you above your pain.
With all my heart and all my freedom, this I promise. I love you, my soldier......
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