Sometimes I hate this life.

""
-- Caelanwolf - griffey chriss - Shakespeare's Monkeys

 Some days are worse than others. Those days where you accidentally hear something you shouldn't have, and it stays with you for an agonizing amount of time...

I find the hardest times during a deployment to be the final month of something. The final few weeks until he comes home for R&R, where I get my husband back for a few weeks only to have to send him back to That Place, or when there are only a few weeks left until that magical redeployment date arrives. It's also the scariest time. I am much more emotional than usual, even if I don't show it, and my whole being becomes hyper-sensitive.

I haven't hear from my husband in a week, which is nothing for us, but it's an anxious time for a couple of reasons. One is that his squadron is moving across the country of Iraq to a new base, and I don't know enough about how that happens to be comfortable in my own assumptions. Secondly, he will be leaving to come home in a few weeks, so I am already on edge.

I keep up with the news and the deaths during OIF and OEF on my own terms, so that I don't have to experience that shock value when I hear war stories on the news and radio. This system works well for me.

Every so often there is a hiccup in my system, and for the second time in almost six months, I had one this morning.

I warmed my car up on the inside while I brushed the snow from the windows and headlights, getting ready to head to college. The CD player in my car broke, but the radio still works, so I listen to NPR regularly while driving. As I was pulling out of my apartment building complex the woman on the radio said a soldier had been killed in Iraq. The same province Jerrad is moving to. It was a gunner (Jerrad's position in the humvee.) The way she described what a gunner's job is... she used the same words I do. It was eery. And now my brain won't settle down.

Logically, rationally, the chances of something bad happening to my husband are quite slim, but the chance still exists (and if one more person tells me that he could get hit by a bus as a civilian I WILL strangle them.)

...just let him come home to me.