Widowed to the Sea
October 3, 2007 | 12:47 am | Uncategorized | Below The 38th Parallel, The Man | 0
The best and worst thing about our cracker-box apartment is the living room window — literally a bay window — which looks out onto the East Sea. On a good day, if I get up early enough, I can watch the sun rise over the crescent of land just southeast of our little town. On a good night, I find the lights of the ships in the yard and the flash of welders working the third shift oddly beautiful, like the Christmas Trees of my youth.
On a bad day I’m bitter at how human intervention has ruined the natural beauty of one of Korea’s most beautiful places. On a day like today, I can watch from my couch as ships, rigs and submarines, sometimes belonging to multinational companies, sometimes belonging to the military, perform their slow dance in and out of the docks and folds of the quay.
Today, my husband was on one of those ships. He left before the sun was up this morning and it could be a month before I get to see him again.
A part of me is glad he’s finally sailed out. The project is finished and as soon as he gets back from Singapore we can begin to make plans to move home and start the next phase of our life. But a part of me feels lonely and sad and restless. By tomorrow he’ll be hundreds of miles away at sea, and I’ll wake up in our bed alone, with no way to get in touch with him and no idea of when he’ll be home.
And this trip to sea is just the beginning — this marks the first goodbye in a series of goodbyes that I’m not quite prepared for yet, the first of many month-long trips away from me after the two of us have spent nearly every moment we’ve lived in Korea with only each other to depend on. I look forward to the time off he’ll have every other month, but I’m not looking forward to the cold hard fact that next year we’ll really only be together for a total of six months.
At first I didn’t think there would be tears. I though, “I better get used to this,” but as we kissed goodbye this morning he held me for a little bit longer than I expected. I’ve done this before. It was just a long time ago, and since then the two of us have really come to reply on each other in more ways than I can explain without sounding clingy and lonely. It would be so different if we were in Houston, where I have friends and plans and distractions to keep me busy each day. It would be different if I wasn’t such an outsider here, if I wasn’t so sick of small town life and desperate for home and a return to normalcy anyway. It would be different if there was some concrete schedule, some calendar on the wall where I could X out the days. But for now I have to find ways to keep myself distracted and find solace in the fact that soon, soon, we’ll be packing our boxes and I might very well miss this place when that time comes.
It’s funny, I had this silly little idea in my head that I might stand on the dock and wave him goodbye with a my handkerchief in my hand. Instead, I sat in the living room and looked out the window every few minutes until finally, nine hours after we first said goodbye, the tugboats lined up to pull him past the breakwater and around the peninsula where the sun will rise tomorrow morning.
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