THE MEANINGLESSNESS OF SOON

Time has slowed to a crawl for me.

You see...according to the schedule, CPT Patti, the sweetest woman on the planet, is to return home this weekend. As a result, the days have transformed themselves into vast, seemingly endless stretches of time.

And I feel as if I know the sentiment behind the phrase "waiting to exhale".

In these circumstances words like "soon" and "near" and "close" have no meaning. They will have no meaning until the event they describe, her homecoming, is in the past tense.

"Soon" means nothing if "never" is still a possibility.

You see...the flag in front of our brigade HQ building flies at half staff today. We lost one of our own on Sunday. Doubtless somewhere there are loved ones who only Saturday were hearing well wishers use words like "soon".

"Soon" means nothing if "never" is still on the table.

It is like this...for me anyway. The last 331 days were, at the beginning, an ocean. Each day of the deployment is a quantity of water. And the ocean is full of mortal danger...which we will represent with salt. As every day has passed, one day's worth of the water has evaporated. The salt does not evaporate however...it is left in the remaining water. So today, there is only a handful of water remaining...but it is packed with an entire ocean's worth of salt.

The danger has not decreased. We see that clearly on the flagpole.

And just as the salt is thick, so too is the stress I'm feeling. I don't mean to be selfish...I don't mean to be negative. I'm simply being honest.

"Soon" is a concept that doesn't work here.