The blog I'm posting below is actually something I wrote almost a year ago.  It was just prior to Christmas 2008 and right before my 8th anniversary.  As is turns out (just as I had planned mind  you), it was going to be my last Christmas on active duty and the last Christmas apart from my wife.

Now that I'm out and living the, "normal life" I now know what it means to walk this country's roads wrapped in the protective warmth of the freedoms made possible by all those men and women who spend their holiday's alone and in far distant and often hostile lands.  I now know the undying gratitude for all those soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors who will make my Christmas merry by making their's another day on the job.

 God bless you guys, where ever you are.

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I'll Be Home For Christmas, If Only In My Dreams (and thats okay)

(originally written December 2008)

The holidays have a strange way of spinning people around in an emotional tizzy.  The crowds, the traffic, the traveling, the skyrocketing credit card bills.  It’s enough to drive a sane person into the asylum and a sober person into merry bouts of cirrhosis.  Generally though, by the time the big two-five of December rolls around, everything is better.  Our traveling is done, the family is all together, and the warmth of each other is enough to drive even the bitterest winter chill from our bones.

This past Friday my wife, Kristina, and I celebrated our eighth anniversary.  Four-fifths of a decade ago two young fools in love ran off together six days before Christmas and tied the knot without the slightest bit of warning to their respective families.  In those eight years we've made two beautiful boys, moved five times, and have shared our life (and still do) with a submarine.  Of those eight years, we've also spent the past year and a half of it apart.  I'll save you the suspense . . . it sucks ass.  It sucks especially hard around this time of year with the holidays and our aforementioned anniversary.  You know what though?  As bad it it hurts to be apart, and as morbid as it sounds, I am happy and grateful for the pain of our seperation.

I remember when I was a young sailor on board my first boat, I went to a retirement ceremony for a man I served with.  During the closing volleys of his speech he started shooting off a list of thank you's to all the people that have helped him succeed through twenty-five years in the Navy.  The very last person he thanked was his wife of twenty years.  You know the cliche, "last but not least"?  This little adage definetly applied here.  The homage he paid her, and the addoration in his voice as he did, it was clear that the life that was this man's could not have existed without the love and support of his better half.  When he was finally done, he ended his tribute to his bride with, "I love you more now than I did the day we were married."

I don't mind telling you, when I first heard him say that, it bugged the shit out of me.  To my inexperienced mind and heart it baffled me into anger to think that an all encompassing, all powerful emotion like love could be given a quantitative measurement.  People walk this planet in search of it.  Poems, books, and plays are written about it.  People philosophize trying to understand it.  They fight to keep it.  They'd die to preserve it.  Now this guy who walked his own yellow-bricked road to his personal merry-oh land of Oz is telling me that not only was he able to do what every other lonely person in creation is dying to do, but that the love he found actually grew!  Like a CD or an IRA.  It seemed like bullshit.  If nothing else it seemed kind of selfish and just a little too fantastic.

You know, God is a pretty smart dude.  I think he gives us chance to be young and stupid on purpose so that when we get older and start figuring out the answers to some of life's little equations, we can be amazed that we ever got out of our teenage years.  I'm telling you, being apart from Kristina for our anniversary and for the holidays hurts like a cancer.  But as bad as it is I am grateful to feel the pain and misery of our seperation.  I'm grateful because the alternative is to not feel it.  In an infinite universe with infinite possiblities, there could possibly exist a time and place where there is no "Eloy & Kristina" (sitting in a tree . . . K-I-S-S-I-N-G . . .).

But that time and place isn't here.  If I have a choice between the hurt and nothing, well my friends, chain me to the fucking wall.  My Bonnie may lie over the ocean, my Bonnie may lie over the sea, but the love I carry for her and the life we have is larger and farther reaching than the miles between us.  The seperation we're living is a temporary thing.  The sting of it lessens with every passing day.  And in 290 more, I'll finally be home for good.

In the mean time, don't cry for me Argentina.  I have work, my best pals, Mr. J. Daniels, and a freezer full of ice cubes to while away the holiday hours.  I also have this wonderful little life in my own little shangrila that I created eight years ago and counting with this wonderful woman who I love.

And yes, I love her more now than the day we were married.