525,600 Miles...Practically

Yeah, so by noon today, SSG Allbritton will be en route to a foreign land. I found out over the weekend when he was leaving, and the anxiety has been mounting since then. This is my attempt to figure out why.

1. It's 7,177 miles away. Approximately.
2. It's unsafe. Camp Shelby was practice. I have been assured by Corey and people who work with him that he is exceptional at what he does. Iraq isn't as dangerous these days as, say, Afghanistan. But it is an underdeveloped, violent country and to NOT acknowledge the possibility that something could happen to him is just foolish.
3. That means that something bad is probably going to happen to somebody. I hope I don't know them. Or their families.
4. Erin is sick and I may be making an involuntary career change, neither of which I am comfortable with or inspired to face without my partner.
5. I turn 30 tomorrow. Corey will be on an airplane. Or in the desert without a phone.
6. It's the little things. Daily interactions make our days and nights and moods. Every day you come home and there's someone waiting for you there who wants to hear about a scandalous conversation you had over lunch or why you were commended for a job well done or why you laughed so hard you peed. So we will miss all the little daily experiences you have, to share with each other, that combine to make whatever kind of year your have. We won't be able to witness each other. (That's from a movie, about getting married to be a witness to someone's life.)
7. I spent a lot of time without him once, and I was happy for a lot of it and lost for some of it, and there's injustice in the world that I have to go without him again.

But I am very proud of him. I waited for so many years for Corey to become a good partner, and he finally did, and it's because he found a purpose. Well, he actually found two - the military and fatherhood. This year was destined to be a hard year for us, even without deployment, and his attempts to keep me from feeling like I'm doing this all alone are constant, and often successful. Even the dog is depressed. He's usually sitting up in his kennel waiting for me to bust his ass out in the morning, but this morning he was laying down, face on the pad. I'm certain he was moping.

I won't see him for six months and that is a paralyzing reality that I'm today really understanding the magnitude of. It's been an idea before now. It's the reality. So how do you keep somebody close to you when they're 7,177 miles away? How do you minimize the distance? How do you not reunite as strangers? This is an adventure I blindly agreed to on 11.22.08, but I will never for a single second be sorry for it. He's been all there was for me since I was 15 years old. Years of estrangement didn't stop that. Neither will this inconvenient deployment.

It will be a while before I have an address for him. But when I do, I'll post it, as well as what you can and should send to him, and what you cannot send him.

Measure in love. Buckle up I love you. See you in September.
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