The Military School (En)

The Distance

One would have thought that after more than a year they would have gotten used to living away from each other but the reality was quite different.

Carina often woke up in the middle of the night sweating, having had a nightmare that Maya had been killed during a mission and that she would never see her again.
She never told anyone about these dreams.

She knew Maya wasn't gone yet, but ever since the day Maya left a year ago and the announcement that she was going to military school and then on a mission, the closer the deadline came, the more she felt it in her gut. There was nothing she could do about it. So she wrote.

She wrote about all the feelings of pain that went through her body. She wrote about her nightmares, about her fears, about the pain she felt about having her love away from her.

Of course she would cry on the phone after a hard day, but she didn't want to cry on the phone, she didn't want Maya to blame herself, because it wasn't her fault, she didn't make the decision to leave. No, she wanted to hold Maya but that was impossible.

Andrea saw it well, his sister had changed, she had become sad, in a general way, when Maya was not around, the light of the beautiful Italian evaporated. He did not like to see it thus, nobody liked to see it thus, her, which certainly before Maya was reserved, was now reserved and sad.

The first few nights when one of them had to go home were the most difficult. After spending 4 days or a month sleeping together the pain was just as intense. They could convince themselves for days that the smell of the other persisted on a shirt or a pillow, until they resigned themselves and washed them. This was surely the most painful feeling and moment, the emptiness afterwards. The lack, the loneliness after one of them is gone. It was in these moments that they stayed the most time cloistered in their respective rooms, going out only to go to class. Or to eat a little. Everything seemed bland to them, even the blue of the sky or the warm wind that caressed their faces. This feeling would fade after two or three weeks. But deep down it was still there. It was just less noticeable or a feeling of habit had taken over.

The Italian was doing her best to hide it to Maya because she had made a promise to her but this last one was not fooled and then she could not blame Carina. She also woke up at night, she was having anxiety attacks, about Mason, about her Italian, about a lot of things and only the latter knew how to calm her anxiety attacks, but she was far away and powerless. She could not thus force herself to reveal it to her.

The first separation had been the most painful but also the least painful.

It was the most painful because it was sudden, everything had happened in three days. After finding Carina on the tarmac, Andrea had been there for her. And the videos of Maya that she was still watching months and months, even years, later had been a big part of it.

But at one point it wasn't that he had stopped being there, but Carina was putting on a good face, among other things for her, and she knew she would see her again. She didn't want to bother others with her 'problems'. And her brother was happy with Sam. She didn't want to spoil that for him.
That didn't stop her from sometimes going to her brother's bed at night, snuggling up to him, crying and falling asleep. It was one of her two favorite pairs of arms in this world.

For Maya it had been the same. Arriving during the year in a country where she had not been for 5 years. In a state she didn't know. With people she didn't know, without Mason. Alone, alone in the world. And yet what tore at her heartstrings the most was having to leave Carina. She could have lived decently in a new place alone, as long as Carina was there everything would have been fine.

They had spent 14 months together and now nothing. Sometimes she imagined that Carina would walk through the door and make her own little face when she said or did something wrong.
She loved it when she did that. It was one of the reasons she loved her.