Waiting

Surely I will hear something soon!

I realized last week that since I've moved, her parents don't have my new phone number. They probably wouldn't be able to find me to let me know what is going on. I am too nervous to call them though. There is actually something blissful about ignorance. Ignorance is allowing me to live with less anxiety on a daily basis.

Since I don't know if she is still in the Middle East, I do get anxious when I hear about the growing violence in Baghdad, but I have no evidence that she is there, so I can let go of that pretty quickly.

Since it was clear she would be deployed, I was pretty diligent about watching and reading the news and taking lots of notes. I started out by trying to write a history of the war--like the ones I had to memorize in grade school. I also kept a running list of the soldiers who had died, what branch they were in, what their rank was and how and where they died. I have always admired Virgnia Woolf's notetaking; I thought I could find patterns by doing the same.

I thought that I could manage this by staying on top of it and writing it all down. But there is no way for me to manage this war. It became too overwhelming.

At first it made me angry that others didn't keep up on the war. It worried me how easily all of this can be forgotten. But I couldn't keep up either and it was not because I was apathetic. This situation is unmanageable.