[AlternateGray]

"Purging time.

I’m not on the net. I’m writing this on word, just to get it out… if it helps, I might not post it after all, but I’ve found that writing to yourself about some things is a lot like… well… you know. It works a little bit, but sometimes it just doesn’t purge the urge.

The reason I’m not on the net is that… a military wife hasn’t heard yet that her husband is dead. She doesn’t know. I keep checking the internet connection. Not because I’m all that worried about getting on. Because when it no longer says “… cable is unplugged” with a little red X, I’ll know that she finally knows. I don’t know why it bothers me so much. She’s going to find out- whether it’s now or tomorrow; and his death is irrevocable, timeless in a way. It’s hard to know that she’s sleeping now, perhaps worried but still full of faith, and she doesn’t know that nothing is ok. To know what’s awaiting her a few hours from now. It’s the prelude to a nightmare.

It’s the first death in the company. In any company I’ve been in. I didn’t know him well, but well enough to be impressed by him. If he was an asshole, or hell, even an average guy, I don’t think it would hit the guys quite as hard. But he wasn’t, and it does.

I’m near tears, and I can’t be this way. It doesn’t make sense. Not to be callous, but I didn’t know him well enough to be this upset, and I don’t know her from Eve. I don’t know what it is.
On to the other purge.
I fell madly in love with my wife eight years ago… at a point very early on, that ended. She broke my heart a few times (ok, more than a few), I swept it under the rug, and when we moved it seemed like a good chance to forget about the past. I figured time heals all things, and that sooner or later I’d fall in love with her again, or at least feel some passion again. It has been six years since we moved, and I have not. Marriages are not built on passion, but they require it every now and then… (insert fitting plant/water analogy here). I’m stubborn, and I like to think of myself as loyal, but in the last couple of months I’ve finally realized that I’ll probably never love her in that way again. It’s finally sunk in. While painful, I can deal with that, but there’re so many other issues in our marriage to boot. I’m going to ask her to go to counseling when I get back… and I hope that will help. I’ll be at a complete loss if it doesn’t. I have a ten-year-old stepdaughter, I’ve raised her since she was two, I love her so much I can’t even say… and I can’t destroy her family. I can’t. I’ve learned a little bit about how traumatic a divorce can be for a child -oddly enough, from others’ posts here… my own mother was married 9, count ‘em, 9 times, divorced 8 times, but if I ever felt any guilt over the third one with my father (I doubt it, I was a little young) it was quickly replaced with bewilderment at numbers 4,5,6,7… and to be honest, we were usually way happier about the divorces than we were about the marriages. We used to joke that if she wasn’t careful she was going to run out of assholes. I could make a trivia game based solely off of her marriages- “Name all of Jill’s exes- double points if you can remember last names”. (Much like naming the states, there’s always one you forget). “Which ex did Jill actually marry and divorce twice?” (answer- I don’t remember. I should, but I don’t). Occasionally my brother and I would sit around and try to remember some of this stuff.

I’m not quite sure what the point of this post is, other than to get stuff off my chest. I do know one thing, though. Train wreck of a marriage or not, my life could be worse.

And I’m kind of dreading the moment that little red X disappears from the toolbar. "