A Week to Go

My husband is leaving for the Middle East on Tuesday next week.

I must make a few things clear, first.

He's an Air Force officer.

He's an EWO, meaning he jams communication signals.

He will only be over there for three months. That's apparently the length of time studies have shown airmen to maintain top functionality during flight.

He will sometimes be out on missions for days straight.

Sometimes, he'll wait around in the dorms for weeks.

We've been apart before.... About nine months. This was indeed a gestation period. For tension and resentment, bitterness, fear, longing, shame, frustration. But that squalling child grew up and is now a relatively sedate four-year-old.

Am I afraid of repetition? Not very.

Here, then, are some of the comments:

Are you worried?

How're you coping?

If there's anything I can do...

We'll be praying for you.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

There is not much to be sorry for, I respond to that last, since he will only be gone for three months... unless the person is generally sorry that soldiers fight and hurt other soldiers and try not to hurt civilians, though they don't always succeed. Then, I accept your apologies. (But who am I to receive them, really?) To the others, I don't always know what to say. Thank you, I appreciate that, Your prayers are so kind. But worried? Should I be? Everyone seems to think so. Or perhaps, they simply think that since everyone whose husband goes overseas is worried--whether or not she actually is does not come into mind--I should be worried too. I don't know quite what to make of it.

I will know if I should be worried when he gets back, I think.

Pressed but not crushed...

Well, okay, crushed.

It's hard to be anything but when you do what you told yourself and everybody else you wouldn't do--get your hopes up about your YA book getting published--and then get rejected.

It was a nice letter, but it's still one of those moments.

Inbox (1)

You stare at it.

You hold your breath. You click on it.

You read it. Again. And one more time for good measure.

You stare away the moisture--those are not tears.

You decide not to tell anybody.

Then you decide to tell everybody.

A big long exhale, and.... Here we go again.

A Dangerous Cocktail

Recipe:

--1 somewhat serious perusal of St. Augustine's Confessions
--1 rapt viewing of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight

Shake..... (Read the warning label)

What comes out? Well, if you're like me (it helps to dust the cocktail with a good helping of suspended disbelief), you get a tragic, mental, emotional, ripping noise that comes from your gut and ends up hanging, embarrassingly, in the room like a frumpy ghost.

The cats think it's all good fun.

Why exactly are love stories like that (Achilles and Patroclus, Romeo and Juliette, Troilus and Cressida, Layla and Majnun, or Clapton and Pattie Boyde, for that matter) so compelling?

And--forgive me, this is not systematic philosophical inquiry by any means--why does it seem like the story is, at bottom, that which moves us, and not sympathy for the individuals themselves, trapped by their tragedies? It is not the sweet, loyal face of Patroclus that we pine for. Clapton's "Layla" does not invoke a sudden desire to see (extend to the other senses) the object of his personal "brand of heroine." It's the idea of the story that draws us, hungry and battling some inner turmoil we can't quite articulate, to these fictions.

But I've stepped over a line, calling them fictions, as if positing that we don't respond equally to "true" stories. But then, retold, what story is entirely devoid of fiction?

Let that rest, though.

My question: Is it the idea that we cherish, the idea that two people can want each other so badly.... We've certainly felt it ourselves. But if the dream fails for us, as it so often does, was it the dream that we loved or the human embodiment that dream?

And poor Augustine, to hold sexual love as the basest of human desires. Well, it's certainly the source of great suffering; some romantics would give anything for a crack at such love.

So what if, indeed, it is the dream we long for? Are we not, as Augustine would say, blind to the true nature of our desires, which crave the invisible, intangible, unchanging things, the dreams that vanish upon waking, whispers so frail they splinter and dissipate when the story ends, and we are left hollow, seeking incarnations in the place of some divinity? In other words, are we crazy?

Ugh! *stupid cocktail* Why this wretched desire for this opium that wreaks havoc on our capacity to appreciate, er, pretty damned much anything during the time the mind succumbs to the dream?

And afterwards? A lingering throb, the bite of regurgitated bile.

Warning: (1) Serving size is directly proportional to the extent of hangover one wishes to endure days following. (2) Consumption of the above recipe impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems.

Waiting on Debra Dixon

Debra Dixon, the fiction editor at Bell Bridge Books, has requested a "more detailed synopsis" of my YA Down the Twisted Lane. Hoorayack! Can't celebrate too soon.

Because this could mean one of two things.

1. Debra, like any good editor, one month ago put her newest acquisition under the "stack" (probably electronic but still going by the same old name) of manuscripts "to read." A month later, she finally finishes off Manuscript X and finds my manuscript, still unread, at the bottom. She thinks, "Hmm, the author--this... Lora Rivera--has been waiting for a while. I'll ask her for more to give me more time." So she asks for the only thing she doesn't have (having already the full manuscript, the author's bio, and a short synopsis): a "more detailed synopsis."

Or...

2. Debra, like any good editor, one month ago put her newest acquisition under the "stack," eventually got to my manuscript, read, oh, say, a third of it, and found it quite intriguing and quite complicated. (It is.) So she sends off for a "more detailed synopsis" to see if the thing is at all viable before spending her valuable time reading the rest of the manuscript.

Let's hope for option 2. It's the best.