The Man Archives
Tourist attractions
11:16 pm | 0 | Shorts | Conversations, Places, The Man
Recently got this email from my number one husband:
Here’s to hoping the next seven days fly by…
Sixteen days and counting
10:36 am | 0 | Shorts | Conversations, Places, The Man
When I fly to Frankfurt I have to bring both C’s luggage and my luggage with me. This morning he sent me the following email regarding packing:
Never tear us apart
11:35 pm | 1 | Blog | Girly, The Man
C left yesterday for what is supposed to be his last regular trip overseas. This is the sound of me crossing my fingers.
At the start of the year we were eager to undertake this experiment, to live the life of vagabonds, to willingly separate ourselves for the sake of having more time together, and on the surface I would say the experiment worked. This has, after all, been a epic summer for travel: scooter rallies, road trips, overnight motorcycle rides. It may seem glamorous — I had a friend say Saturday “You’re going out of town again?” but the truth is that I have spent more time alone in the past 8 months than I have in the five years previous and when my husband is gone I miss him so much I can not sleep at night.
When he’s home we never fight because there’s not enough time to fight and make up for the previous 30 days. We sleep late and stay up late and eat out too much and struggle to fit everything else in to the allotted time.
But when he’s away I can barely hear his voice over IP without breaking into tears. I have to make notes about all the things I want to share with him because I’m afraid I’ll forget to tell him. We have to schedule sessions because his workdays are 12-hour shifts and he’s 6 timezones away.
What made it particularly heartbreaking yesterday is that this last time home has been one of the funnest so far. I really did not want to tell him goodbye. In the morning I said to him “I’m not ready for you to leave yet.” In the afternoon, as he walked into the airport terminal and I moved into the driver’s seat I rolled down the window and yelled to him at the top of my lungs “I love you.”
Wednesday I am flying to California for a week. And in a month, instead of me picking him up at the airport here in Houston, he will be picking me up at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany. To celebrate the end of the Living Apart Experiment we will spend three weeks traveling Europe. Together.
209 Miles to Matagorda
11:55 am | 0 | Photo Album | Places, The Man, Two Wheels
C and I have been daydreaming of a multi-state motorcycle trip. It’s something both of us have always wanted to do, and now that we have a big person’s motorcycle we’ve been taking day trips and overnight trips just for the pure pleasure of being on the machine.
Last month, in the few days between C’s return home and our trip to Florida, we managed to take a seven-hour ride down to Matagorda and the Gulf, exploring country roads as we went.
The water wasn’t any nicer than Galveston, but 521 is a great little tree-lined shady highway with a few twists and turns and plenty of tiny red farmhouses along the way.
This month we hope to ride out to the Texas Hill Country, maybe stop near the Guadalupe River for a dip in the icy waters. It’s all part of our Great Texas Tour. Incidentally, if you’re planning your own Texas Tour, might I recommend two books? Day Trips from Houston and Weird Texas.
Wow. Things sure did get boring around here for a while. Sorry about that. More adventures to come soon.
Auf wiedersehen
I had an awesome weekend at the museum. Really awesome. I got paid to attend a party, got to drink a glass of wine and flirt on the job, met dozens of fascinating people and was invited to three (three!) after parties.
So I am really sad that tomorrow is going to be my last day. I gave notice two weeks ago because C comes home Wednesday and I want to be able to spend as much time with him as possible. The whole purpose of this living apart experiment is that we could spend every day together on the months that he is home but with me working that has just not been possible. We are now halfway through his assignment and we are determined to make the second half better than the first half. We are determined to do it right.
I will not be bored when he is gone! I will hang out at the museum and write all day! I will take the dog to the dog park and read a book a week again and finish the baby blanket I’ve been knitting since December.
Widowed to the Sea
12:47 am | 0 | Uncategorized | Below The 38th Parallel, The Man
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.
In bed
1:51 am | 5 | Blog | Girly, The Man
So my friend Steven hosted a ’70s party tonight at Numbers, the dance club around the corner from our house, and I got all dressed up in vintage gear and walked over there to support him and all. And I stayed for a few hours, and then walked home and washed my face and changed into an old t-shirt I’ve had since high school, and just now opened all the windows in our house and laid on the bed on top of all the covers to check my e-mail. And just now, all of all sudden, it started raining really hard, which is one of my favorite things in the world, because we have a corrugated metal roof on our house, and the windows are open so I can hear the rain really well in this sort of acoustic through-both-the-windows-and-the-roof kind of way, and it has just made my day, even though it’s only 1:50 a.m. Sunday morning. The only thing that sucks is that my favorite person in the whole wide world is not here laying next to me and enjoying it as well.
The thing that has already ruined my whole day, and it’s only 9:14 in the morning
9:16 am | Comments Off | Shorts | Girly, The Man
I realized while driving to work that it has been 17 days since I was last kissed.
You men and your size thing
6:27 pm | Comments Off | Blog | Conversations, The Man
My friend Lance, the e-mailing genius, the part-time photographer, the man who will be photographing my wedding, sent me another e-mail yesterday. The text in parenthesis was added by me so the e-mail makes a little more sense:
“hey ding-dong, i was planning on going (to the Y) tomorrow night after work but i may be going to a “gentlemens club” to take some photos for my hempstead rd project. ill let you know tomorrow morning. hows life minus a (future husband’s last name redacted)? we should sell his tv and buy a fucking helicopter. if you get lonely come over and have a drink. that soundtrack (“The Life Aquatic”) is the bananas, annie has it.
When C and I first started dating, one of our very first dates was a “movie night” at his house. We both love old movies and artsy films, and he subscribes to Netflix, so much of our time together in the following months was spent on his couch in front of his TV. I had been to his house before, but this was the first time we had really planned a night in. I think he cooked something, and I’m positive he mixed some rum drinks.
As we sat down on the couch, he turned to me, in all seriousness, waved his arm in the general direction of his six-foot-tall flat-screened high-definition television, and said “You know, there’s only one TV on the market right now that’s bigger than this one.”
That right there sealed the deal, folks.
Bachelorette Party: Day 4
4:02 pm | Comments Off | Blog | Girly, The Man
C left for South Korea, where he’ll be spending the next seven weeks, early Sunday morning. So early, in fact, that I had no plans to drag myself out of bed to walk him to the door, so we said our goodbyes the night before, and I laid in bed futilely fighting fatigue until 1:30 or so in the morning, afraid to fall asleep because I knew it was the last chance I’d have for the next seven weeks to lay in the arms of this wonderful and amazing man.
When he gets back, we’ll have a month here together in which we have a checklist of things to accomplish. Some of those things include getting married, getting vaccinated and visa-ed, packing everything we own and trying to fit it into a 10-by-10 storage space, and moving to South Korea. Until then, I’ve been trying to keep busy with wedding planning, 40-miles bike tours of Houston and running with our running club each week.
C called at 11 p.m. Monday evening, which was 2 p.m. Tuesday afternoon his time, to tell me that he had landed and was safe and okay. I was so glad to hear from him that I couldn’t really think of anything to tell him other than I love you and I miss you.
I don’t know how military wives do it, waiting for the letter or phone call that — for a few days at least — sets their concerns at ease. Sunday night, Monday night and last night were pretty sleepless for me. Here I am, alone in his house, trying to fall asleep in his bed, the bed I’ve never slept in alone.
“It’s hard for me to imagine you there without me,” he said over the phone.
Sure, my stuff is there, I live there too, but when I walk into our closet in the morning to get ready for work, all I see are the rows of his vintage dress shirts from Sears hanging all around me and his gigantic house shoes — the shoes that normally annoy me in the morning because they make a “clop clop” noise on our concrete floor. But I look at them now and wonder if, since it’s still winter in South Korea, are his feet cold? Does he come home after work and just lay in front of the television until he falls asleep like I’ve done for the past several days? Does he feel displaced too, or is he settling into the far-away apartment that will be our first home together as a married couple?
I’ve been trying to keep busy — I really have. I have plans for every weekend this month. I’ll be doing this, celebrating this and going to a party here. And I have plenty of friends who are begging at my door to take me out and show me a good time.
The problem is I don’t want to be shown a good time. When I’m with C, I always have a great time. Life is so much better when you have someone you love to share all your experiences with, miserable and euphoric.
I can’t wait to move to Korea.