11

14APR2009

During the day of the deployment ceremony, I tried to follow BSN’s advice that I talk more to K____, or at least, I had that advice on my mind.
I tried to tell him about my pass as we sat in the car, his girlfriend listening. I lose people, I said, While others rack them up. Sometimes I leave people, sometimes I get bored, sometimes I grow out of them. I don’t get it .. I asked K____ what he thought.
He said he didn’t know. I said I needed a normal person’s opinion. He laughed. It felt like an unsuccessful conversation.
As we walked across the parking lot heading to the start of the ceremony, K____ said, _Well, Chuck, if you listen to your own story, you’d know that it will never be about my leaving you, and always about when you will choose to leave me._
Later, during the actual ceremony, the conversation started again. I told him about what it was like to be in my Hometown.
How there was no ease in the conversation, with my supposed foster family. I explained to him how I had counted on the line: your friends are the family you chose.
Turns out though, your friends will never be your family. Family is something else entirely. I do have family, and they cannot be replaced.
The loss felt unacceptable during the pass. I didn’t tell him everything, but I did explain, slowly, phrase by phrase, what it was like to be standing there, without any ease of conversation, with people I’m not actually related to, leaving for a deployment, understanding there were no real genetic bonds between us, understanding I might be easily forgotten.
It felt like I had lost them, too. I couldn’t explain it, though, until I understood it for myself enough to articulate it. In order to do that I had to ask him questions.
Like if there was ease to the conversation when he visited to his Dad. What about his brothers?
I asked him what it would be like if I went to Africa as a foreign exchange student, instead of him, and I came home to find him a totally different person.
_Well, I mean, if you had a problem with that .. _ K____ said. And at that point I understood, and could articulate myself. That time, I got it right, and was understood, and was authentic.
In hindsight, maybe it was the back and forth between me and K____ that clarified the moment for me. There’s something to that.