Me and the Military

I have a strange relationship with the military. Not typical for your elitist, liberal, un-real American girl. For one there is my cousin, who was overseas while his child was born and is now, thankfully, in Florida with his wife and his young family. I wrote about his goodbye party as my admissions essay, about how strange it was, the feeling that it was a pre-death wake. Yet we could not speak death's name, it was silently forbidden. Now, we all have reason to hope that we will only attend a wake for him when he has died an old grandfather, with grey hair and crepey hands.

And then there are the men I have been involved in. Or perhaps I should say boys? A string of ROTC members, and students at military colleges. A strange history for a Vassar girl. There was P., who swept me off my feet one New Year's eve, after a summer of dangerous flirtation, and remains fluttering on the periphery of my life. And then there was T., who I met at one weekend for a wedding and cried over on Monday, sad that his tender hands would grip a gun. These are the important ones, but there where others.

The always surprise me with their gentleness, the strength of their manners. How they know to buy a girl a drink just so, so she does not feel hunted. How they speak of their mothers. And how they surprisingly hesitate, waiting to know that this kiss, this touch, is the one you want.

I think of T.'s hands, and how on the first night we just caressed the hands and arms of each other, sleeping in a living room full of other people after a bachelor/ette night in a bar, and unable to do more. I remember how it seemed his skin barely touched mine, but I still felt like I was burning, and I longed to burst into flames.

But then I cry afterwards because I fear that all this gentlesness will be ruined, that these hands that caressed by hair and my hands and my breasts will become forever stained by blood. I long to put my hands on their foreheads and wipe away all they know of how to kill, like I would wipe away a sheen of sweat.

With them, I want the impossible. I wish to save them all, to claim these hands forever on behalf of gentleness and love.

If I allowed myself to fall in love with one of these men, it would destroy us both.