Letters to a Marine

Poison Filled Antidote

Dear Marine                                                               1-22-13

                The room was dark, which was the point really, for it is fairly hard to watch movies in the light, which is why I said my house is where our movie marathon would be because harry potter is watched best in a dark room.  I could still see your vague outline though when I looked up, your shoulder being the most comfortable place to be. I breath in your you smell, listen to your heart beat drown out the sounds of Harry Potter fighting in the background, feel your hand in mine, I soak this all up. And I try to memorize the moment, to imprint it in my mind, for that little scrap book in the back of my mind. Because I know that the chances to fill that mental scrapbook are disappearing. Which I knew was going to happen.

                I watch you sometimes watching me, or the movie, or the friends around us, and this unexplainable feeling grows in me, I feeling I had forgotten about with you gone. I remember the feeling of belonging, but I had forgotten the feeling of just happiness. Like you could chase all the bad out of the world, almost all the bad. There’s still that little one flicker of sadness present that I can’t fully get rid of sometimes. I feel this little sadness hit me, and I hold on to you, thinking that I could make it vanish with your presence. But it sits and stays gnawing at me. Tormenting me. Wrapping up my mind. Trying to take over. Which it can’t, your strong enough I can’t be consumed by this emotion with you next to me, but yet your slightly the cause of it at the same time, so it sits there and stays in the corner of my mind.

                You are both my poison and antidote.

                When you’re here I’m happy as a cat in cream, yet when you’re gone I get that feeling coming back stronger. And with this feeling, I try to dissect it evaluate it, look at it from a new perspective, but no matter how I look at it will always turn out to be the same. This feeling is the prepping of pain. I wish it was just a silly emotion that I could push away, but that slightly logical part of my mind is forcing me to look at this, and I have no way to ignore it.

                My mind shows me this and I open it, reading it like a recipe book, seeing the lists of all what is happening, reading how they can happen, then seeing how it will turn out. So I sit here now, reading this book of me, and wishing I could change it, and feeling the sadness take over. When I’m next to you I can ignore it because I can just put my mind in the present, to look at what I have now and deal with what comes when it comes. Then you go and I am stuck with my thoughts as they consume me, and I look ahead to the future. Not the far away future like 5 years from now, that is only useful when looking for a career, but the future as in less than a month away future. There are several ways I can react to you having to leave. I can stomp my feet and scream and throw a hissy fit for you not to go, cry my eyes out and rant how the world is not fair. I can suck it all up and smile and nod, and say I’m happy, because in a way I’m happy that you enjoy being in the marines, that when you tell stories of it you can smile and laugh. This makes me happy that you enjoy parts of it. And while I’m happy, I’m sad, sad that I know that there’s pain to come, happy to know that even though I see the pain, I can still hold on to you.

                 Yet I am afraid.

                 Yes, there is quite a bit of fear in me. Fear of pain, fear of loss, fear of love. I am afraid to hold on to you, yet I am afraid to let go, I am afraid to depend on you, yet I’m afraid to be alone. You are my poison filled antidote, the thing that keeps me sane while driving me mental, the cure to any pain except to that caused by you. And I am the snake biting its own tail, forever going in a circle, not sure how to stop, not sure if I want to stop. I am the dog trying to catch its own tail, blissfully ignorant that it’s just going in circles. Am I blissfully ignorant? Maybe yes. Am I painfully conscience? Perhaps that too.  

                Even if I know that I will be hurting later, even if that little scrapbook will come back to haunt me, I commit everything of you to memory, to not just forget. To remember the way that you can chase away all the bad but that one little part, which I can now accept and expect for you being my poison antidote.  I may memorize all of you, I may try to separate the good from the bad, but there is now good or bad. There is you. And you are a marine. There isn’t a way to call that bad, nor is it fully good.

                So I accept you, all of you. Resting my head on your chest I feel you dog tags against my cheek, reminding me to never forget what you are, and I smile to know who you are, and to be able to have you for what time I can.

                                                                               -your never ending tail chaser