Old emotions return

Early in the summer of '92, I said goodbye to P. I remember standing on the chair in the dorm lobby, just looking into his eyes, wanting the moment to last forever. I was set to spend the summer working in a factory earning money so I could return to college the next year. He was off to 13 weeks of boot camp. I just wanted to hold on and not let go.

This weekend, I was taken back to that time. The kids were in bed, I was sleepy too. But I knew I had mere hours left until P. was to leave for an extended period- again, 3mos.

I sat on his lap and looked into his eyes. Suddenly, almost 15yrs melted away and I was that 18yo again looking at her 18yo beau, missing him before he was even gone. All the wrongs we had done each other disappeared. We were just two kids, in love.

Again, I have long hours to think of him. Where before it was standing at the controls of a factory machine, my mind wandering, now it's staying at home with the kids, trying to keep my mind on task. I worry about his safety and well-being again. I long to connect with him, as I have almost every day for the last 15yrs. Here's the person I have literally spent my entire adult life with, no matter the problems, arguments, heartbreak...there's a connection there.

Most of you know we are having problems, contributed some by my ongoing depression and some by his own issues. Being apart makes those problems harder and easier. I dwell on them, yet I feel like there is a reason we are so strongly connected. The ache of being apart reminds me of one of my favorite moments in Jane Eyre:

Rochester tells Jane of his feelings of her pending departure:

"'I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you--you'd forget me.'
Chapter 23, pg. 221

If only those feelings were so easy to live through. If only the forgetting was so easy. At least this time I have my kids to share my love with. They have given me more smiles and snapped me out of the doldrums more often than I care to admit.