Nobody Said It Would Be Easy

Even before we signed up to do this, back when it was still in the speculative phases, before we even started to actually plan, we knew this would be hard.  I had flashbacks to studying abroad and making appointments at the immigration office in France and not realizing until I showed up for my appointment that it was an appointment to come and take a number to wait my turn to be dealt with.  We had visions of packing up our whole house full of stuff like a regular move, which is inconvenient as it is, but adding a layer of annoyance by separating out stuff we were going to put in storage, stuff we were going to ship, stuff we were going to take with us and stuff we were going to sell.  We tried to prepare ourselves for the cultural, linguistic and religious differences.  We thought we were all set.  

I never imagined the difficulty that would come along with leaving the house that we had made into a home together and watching our things sold off; not her things or my things, getting rid of our things was the worst.  When we were first moving in I had to work one day and she went over to the house to do some unpacking.  She texted me a picture of our new bed all made up with the sheets and comforter we had bought together.  The picture had the caption "*our* bed".  We had to sell our bed to a couple with four kids on the east side of town.

Yesterday I took her to the airport.  We checked her bags and had to jockey some stuff around so she only had one overweight bag and one extra bag, then we sat down on a bench outside security and said our final goodbyes.  It was just her and me in that moment.  I'm sure we were surrounded by people, but she's the only one I noticed.  When we realized we couldn't put it off any longer I walked her over to security and watched as she got herself and her bags scanned.  She kept looking over her shoulder and waving and I kept waving back.  When she picked up her back on the other side she turned around and I blew her a kiss.  She blew me one back, turned around and walked away.  

I have no idea when I will see my wife again.  A few weeks?  A few months?  How many nights are we going to spend alone with our hearts and minds halfway around the world?  Our first wedding anniversary is exactly 40 days from today.  Will we even get to celebrate that together?  I'm sure that the adventure we will have will make all of this worthwhile, but for right now, it's just really hard.