I finally got more than four hours of sleep last night. I’m still hardly dreaming, though. The only thing I remember dreaming about is going to the grocery store and buying a carton of 2% milk. I think maybe my dad was there.
My nightly routine seems to be working. The one I mentioned before; put on pajamas, which really consist of one of Alex’s shirts and some bottoms, curl up in bed with Sora (my fatigues-clad stuffed polar bear that Alex made smell like him and gave me for Christmas), and listen to the recordable copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas that Alex gave me with Sora. This is exactly what he designed the present around, albeit the book choice was because he thought he was leaving December 5th (we celebrated Christmas early, and for real Christmas he got me Skyrim :3).
But it’s working. I can actually sleep, as opposed to blacking out from exhaustion like I did this weekend. Granted, Monday night it was still at four hours, but today’s my day off, so last night I got to sleep in.
I still cry, and probably will all the way until May, and even then probably every once in a while for the next four years (give or take 3 days). Mostly it’s because I hate not being able to talk to him. Up until yesterday, there had only been one day, at the very beginning of our relationship, where we didn’t talk or text or anything. And it feels weird, and he’s the one I always talk to when I’m upset, but I can’t. I can start my first letter to him, but I can’t send it until he sends us something first, with a return address.
And all the sadness and frustration and worry I feel, and how much I miss him, I feel all of that and know both from instinct and from what he said when he called on Monday before his flight left that he feels all that, too, with the added fear and anxiety of being in boot camp. And there is nothing I can do to make him feel better. I hate that. I feel helpless, and there is nothing I want to do more than write to him and let him know that it’s all right and that I love him and wish I could do all the little things like scratch his head that help him relax (although I don’t know how well that would work right now, since usually I do it on the short, fuzzy hair on the back of his head, and apparently they turn you into a cue ball when you get there. I wonder if they do that to the women, too…). It’s all things I told him before I left, things I told him I’d be telling him if I already had the address and/or if I had the opportunity to talk to him if he could go off-script on his arrival call (he couldn’t). But I want to keep telling him, and he said he wanted me to, so I want it to hurry up and be whatever day his letter will come so I can start writing every day. The post office is going to love me for the ~90 first class stamps (since those are always valid and they keep raising stamp prices) I’m going to buy, that’s for damn sure.
NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY
