Between Courses

She walks into the room and two thoughts come into my head at once; I want to fall in love with her, and I’m embarrassed by my ridiculous haircut. Sitting on a couch watching DVDs of old cult Saturday morning kids shows, trying to make a good impression looking like a cop sticking out like a sore thumb in the midst of skinny, shaggy haired, bearded scenster types. She isn’t classically beautiful, she isn’t even specifically pretty. But she is cute and something about her strikes me and it doesn’t hurt that I am fresh from digging trenches and patrolling through swamps and giddy from the return to world, if only for a brief week of leave. I’m suddenly self conscious, but try to hold onto my confidence; that I can strap live grenades to my body and crawl through the dirt but my heart skips beats if I stand too close, close enough that I can smell a woman, is the result of coming on two years of insanity that isolate us so thoroughly from the people for whom we sacrifice a normal life. But things are ok, after all, charm comes easily to a man with nothing to lose and a plane ticket in his pocket.

And we all go out to the bars, we all dance, and I stare at her when she’s not looking, at the lines of her neck, her back, all the parts of a woman you begin to appreciate sitting in a shell scrape with your best friend at 3 am, shivering through the freezing rain trying to stay awake telling the same old stories of conquest and loss that have kept each other awake and depressed for months and months of training. And it isn’t about sex. It’s about trying to catch a glimpse, trying to seize and hold a tiny moment of normality for as long as you can. It’s about living in a bunk bed for two years of your life and spending every second with your coworkers until you can draw all the scars on their bodies, and all the scars on their souls. I don’t want to sleep with her, I want to hold her, to hug her, to love her, to wake up next to her late in the morning, to have no idea where I am, as long as it isn’t the barracks. But it’s not going to happen. The travelling soldier routine doesn’t work much with the kind of girls you want to be with anyways, or maybe I just don’t have any game anymore. But when my friends decide to leave and she decides to stay, I tell her goodbye and lean in and whisper to her that since I’ll never see her again I can tell her that I think she’s the most beautiful girl there tonight.

And it’s ok, because I shouldn’t have, but it was liberating to say it, to voice the truth at least, to not have to carry any thoughts with me that will remain unsaid forever. But it doesn’t make me feel any better. I’ve been gone long enough now that nostalgia and homesickness, if not even for a place but maybe a lifestyle, have eroded the sense of purpose that made me sign on the dotted line in the first place. At least there is pizza, and two slices and 15 minutes on foot later I am sitting in my friend’s kitchen with my best friend and another acquaintance. So I drink water and check my e-mail while they have another drink and talk. And he tells her a story, about her, about the girl who walked into the apartment and stole my attention for the rest of the night. He tells her how they hung out the other day, how through a combination of booze and drugs they ended up in bed together, how he accidentally slept with her and regrets it because he didn’t feel like it. And maybe that was there I began to remember why I gave up so much. How a young man of 20 can regret sleeping with a beautiful woman, I don’t understand it. I’d sell my soul for a fixed address, let alone a warm body to wake up next to every now and then; but he has everything I want and to him it’s nothing but baggage.

And for a brief second, yes, I feel like beating some sense into him. To these boys who never grow up into men and play video games of my job all day, while taking for granted all the fantastic things in their lives, and the fantastic people, and the women, while I’m stuck doing the job for real in the middle of nowhere, living in a sleeping bag with a rifle and my full fighting order at arms reach, but precious little else. But I know for sure that nothing lasts forever, and one day I will get out of the field and the barracks and have a chance to grasp at the same straws. And unlike this guy, or my friends, or my father, or any one of a million assholes in the world who will never realize the value of what they have, I’ll never take anything I have for granted.