Apart

Saturday afternoon, I dropped Mr. P off at Dulles International Airport. He was leaving for Seoul, via Tokyo for 21 days. 

He's only been away from me for 36 hours. It's palpable. If I learn nothing else in these three weeks, let me learn to never toss around the idea of leaving him lightly.

He embraced me before we left the apartment & asked that I be patient with him while he is away, that the project is a lot of work and he is sure it will be stressful.

I wrote him a love letter before he left. He was due to arrive in Korea on the 1-year anniversary of the night we first met.  I thought it would be a nice gift. 

I wrote the love letter, the only one I can ever remember writing, on a day we were recovering from one of our fights. 

It was sincere, not flowery. We cried a little as he read it aloud in the car, the rain pouring down on the highway as I drove. 

The longer he is away and the more visa problems we encounter, the more I think that I wasn't really wrong in thinking of marriage as an act of security. Even though it's not a guarantee, and the act itself does nothing to prevent relationships from falling apart, from a purely immigration standpoint it provides a hell of a lot of security. 
And why shouldn't I be able to have Mr. P come home to me? He's as much a husband to be as my husband was. In many ways, he's more of a husband. 

In the coming weeks, I expect that I will process his absence in a variety of ways. Some will be healthy ways. Others will be not so healthy. And I will write about many of them.