I
A week ago, my draft orders arrived. Coming home from work that day, I found Aisling, puffy-eyed, sitting at the living room table in front of a mountain of tissues, a damp letter resting on her lap.
“We should just go, Dai. Canada. Mexico. Wherever,” she said simply, as if going AWOL was just something that one did.
“Ais, you have a life here. What good are all those years of school and the living hell of your internship if you just walk away from it all?”
She tugged at her lip with her teeth, her eyes flashing. “What good is all this if you’re dead?”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“I read the papers same as you. The casualty rates for recruits out on the Peninsula are nearly seventy percent. Nothing melodramatic about that.”
“We can’t just up and leave. You can’t, at least. You’re throwing away half a lifetime of study and work. I can’t let you do that.”
“You can’t? Who are you to say…”
And just like that, things went downhill. The argument continued. It wouldn’t end until she accepted the truth. Admittedly, I was happy to debate it with her. When you talk pie-in-the-sky alternatives, you’re still entertaining hope, and that’s something.
“What’s going to happen to us?” she said at last, when there were no more threads to chase down, no more hidden escapes. She was nearly defeated, cried and worn down by the endless evasions.
I sat down in front of her on the floor and we touched foreheads. We liked to talk this way late at night when we had been drinking and neither of us wanted to go to bed. We concocted dreams of futures this way, and talked endlessly about how much we loved one another. It was our sacred space, and now I had to desecrate it.
“This is not you and I in a studio apartment, poor and dreaming anymore. This is war, and responsibility, and law and reality. There is more here than just what’s between you and me.”
Her head snapped up then, her eyes still puffy from tears. I could tell she knew I was right, but she still didn’t want to let go even now.
“Remember Dai,” she said, “what we said to each other that night? That the only thing we’ll ever need is a roof over our heads and each other. Remember that?”
It was the night we had decided to marry. On the way home from the restaurant, giddy with champagne and a vast and unclouded future, we ran into a local park, climbed up onto a large scramble of rocks, and pledged our souls to each other. No matter what happened in our future, we said we would never let money or jobs or worldly responsibilities come between us. We swore to each other that all we would do going forward would be built on that simple pledge. As I looked into her joyful, dancing eyes that night I saw myself reflected back – all my faults transparent and meaningless. The night was cold and the rock we sat upon was hard, but I could have been naked in a freezing rain and not felt it, nor cared.
“Ais, what we didn’t know then was how much we both would be willing to sacrifice for the other. Back then everything was we for our own sake. But now, there’s more. I can’t explain it.”
She sniffled and leaned back away, moving her hair out of her face. She smiled sadly. “That’s what’s so sad. That’s what we never saw coming.”