When I'm strong and feeling fine maybe
When I can look at you without crying
You might look like a friend of mine
But I don't know if I can
Open up enough to let you in
Here come those tears
Here come those tears again
--Jackson Browne
I don't even have to close my eyes whenever I want to see her.
I take a deep breath, and I have to if I want to write this, and now I'm back ten years walking into the airport after a long deployment in the most troubled place in the world; seven months that felt like seven years, and she is waiting for me, my fiancee, my love, my soon to be wife. She was wearing a black leather bustier, tight black pants and high heels. And she has a surprise waiting for me: a white stretch limo that will take us home, with champagne included. You just know what we started there, way too impatient to wait for our bed, what I thought and wrote and messaged her about almost every night I was in the desert.
And it's not difficult at all to remember her when we first started seeing each other and one day she picked me up from a street corner, driving up in a Jeep, and some guy standing next to me and grinning because she looked so fine behind the wheel and thinking maybe some guys have all the luck. She was smiling too, always did when she saw me then.
And later that year when we go to the south of France, our engagement-moon, where I had proposed to her somewhere over the North Atlantic, and the steward served us champagne and they made an announcement over the air; we ate lunch in the open air restaurants that lined the beach. She sits at the table wearing summer wear, and I got a real picture of her that time, her sweet smile, her radiance, how she was then.
That's the picture I used for her obituary