Waiting For Your Call

Phone cards donated to soldiers

Waiting for the woman I love who is deployed in Afghanistan...I sent her a phone card of course, one of the fancy expensive ones, because she is not calling me so often these days. From what she tells me, she is in harm's way frequently. The emails are slowing down too. The words are more generic. WTF.

Or.

She has emigrated to Peru, working for Doctors Without Borders on the wet side of the Andes. I do not know if she will ever return. There is no phone service there but there is in the town nearby. It is higher in the mountains and between that clarity and satellites there is a way to call. I really, really miss her. She says she misses me, but she isn't coming home.

Or.

We came apart a couple years ago, her decision, and she has gone to Germany while I stay in Amsterdam. What I do to pay my bills, I can't really do anywhere else...I am too old now and no one will take me on. She has a goal and is following her own way. She saw I couldn't come and worked it out over several months that her goal was more important than our intimate daily life. We got along really well in most ways. One of the hardest things I have done is reconcile to the idea that she has rejected me. We are still friends. She visits, short visits, frequently, but not only me, never only me. Then she goes back to Germany and her new life.

Or...

Waiting For Your Call

I pace or at least
I dream of pacing, waiting,
hoping you will call
using your new card
to cross international
lines, to reach me here
in my secrecy,
in the jail of my tangled
hope and turbulence.

February 5, 2010 10:48 PM