The Military Wife

I just started-- I'm about fifty pages in and I don't really know where it's going. I thought about this a few weeks ago after watching Brothers. It's a really good movie by the way, incase you hadn't seen it yet-- Gyllenhall is pure sex in it. It's fantastic. I've read interviews before where authors are all "oh I know where every book of mine will end before I write the first word," yeah go fuck yourself, I don't. Anyway. Here's a preview. I'm at a loss already-- the last twoo have been held at a stop sign for about two years, I assume this one will suffer the same fate.

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“Because it is everything I’ve ever wanted to be,” are the only words he uttered to convince her.

When someone tells you this, when some body is so absolutely certain that they have found their path in life, have finally after all these years marked their destiny that they can grip your face in their hands and tell you that this is all they have ever wanted to be, you withdraw your breaths of complaints and hold in the screams that are begging to escape. It is all he ever wanted to be. And though she could not affirmatively stand next to him and agree, and support him and console him in the way that she knew and truly felt she was supposed to, she pretended to. It is everything he ever wanted to be.

A woman cannot tell her best friend of seventeen plus years who graduates from medical school that her schedule will be so impossibly busy and difficult that her chances of finding love and having children and finally living the American dream have incidentally decreased substantially. Nor can a father remind his son who just drove along five thousand meters of runway before finally soaring that gorgeous piece of metal into the sky that he could potentially pull the wrong lever or miss a flashing light in every spot check and ergo kill the hundred people comfortably awaiting their destination. An ex-boyfriend turned talent agent cannot tell the wannabe model that out of six and a half billion people on this planet we all share the same desire for fame and fortune and so, likely, she will be a cocktail waitress in downtown Los Angeles before finally going back home to Texas.

 People do not do these things. People do not crush dreams, especially the dreams of the ones you love. And so when Will told Alex that he wanted to join the army after graduation, she smiled. She told him that he would be fantastic and that the experience would be incredible. She told him that when he travelled she couldn’t wait to go with him and that he could become a Lieutenant or a Colonel, and even though she did not know what any of it meant, even though her knowledge of anything ‘army’ went as far as what the movies had shown, she told him that she was proud.

This is when his face lit up, the worry disappeared and the thick wrinkle that burrowed in the crease of his eye brows moulded back into his skin. He leaned in, so gently that if her eyes were closed she would barely know he was there. His half smile planted a light kiss on her already red cheek while simultaneously uttering the very words that echo in her dreams, and you can be the military wife. There’s a certain stigma that comes with the title—this particular prefix holds within it a loaded suitcase and several carry-on’s of baggage. The military mother. The military father. The military wife. And the most pitied of all, the most heartbroken— the deepest wounds do dwell within the military widow. It brings forth the same reaction at the sheer utterance of the prefix; the same downward look, the uncomfortable sway, the immediately withdrawn breath that screams aww. The military family, the embodiment of heartache, of longing, of sorrow, of patriotism. This prefix. This simple title, it gives birth to ideas before the animate being comes in to a direct view. A cliché of sorts, and yet, a perfect reality singlehandedly carved for and from this particular life. In the same moment that Will picked his future, career and love at hand, he decided hers.