Daveland

The days passed, even though I didn't want them to. One after another.

I stood in CJ's office, dreading the moment. I looked at him, his face never giving anything away. He absently clicked his mouse, hesitating.

"So, where am I going?" I asked, sitting down.
"I already told you, Samarra."
"Do you know anything about it? What are the living conditions like?"
"I haven't been there," he says, his face still blank.
"Can you tell me if they are in tents?"
"I don't know."
"Do I have to go?" I asked, feeling my face starting to flush.
He paused, looking down. "What do you want?"
"I want to stay here." I looked at him, directly into his eyes, and felt something breaking inside me. I was exhausted. I was eating benadryl like candy, anything to stop the pain I was feeling. I had no position, and was alone. I emailed Dave, but he never replied. I had left home a broken woman, and struggled with my return.

I hated being here. I hated being alone. I hated being weak. I was everything I hated. "Isn't there a position open here?" The tears started to drip from my eyes. I tried to ignore them, struggling with all my effort to keep my face from screwing into a contorted mess.

"We have assigned you elsewhere," he said, with little emotion.
"I would like not to have to move anywhere." The endless months of twelve hour days, the stress of being bombed each day, the heat, the boredom, the fact that Dave had broken me into tiny little pieces: the destruction of my life laid bare before me.

And I broke. For a moment, I am sure the dichotomy between what my eyes were saying and the blank expression on my face was disturbing. I tried to bite my lip, tried to stop what I knew was coming, but couldn't. And then I just didn't care. I was broken, and I didn't care who knew. I bent forward, looking at the floor, and could think of nothing but David. By the time I looked up again, I was sobbing.

He looked at me, and for the first time I saw concern. "Are you OK?"
"No. No I am not OK. I just have some things I need to deal with, I just need to get through the end of this contract. I don't want to have to move right now."

I felt ridiculous having to explain. I felt ridiculous for being a woman, for loving a man who so easily left me behind. I felt ridiculous for not being strong enough to deal with everything. I always had been before. Yet now, I was crying all the time, and had been since June. It had been a nightmare, and it was not getting better. All I wanted was to return to my hooch, go to bed, and sleep forever.

I looked up. He leaned back in his chair, drumming his fingers. "You can stay here. I'll give you that slot. Don't worry about what Tom says, I will tell him that you are taking that slot." He paused again. "Are you going to be OK?"
"Thank you," I blubbered, trying to get out of the office as quickly as possible. "Thank you."

I returned to pack up my office, or what was left of it. While I had been gone, they had piled all my stuff in with Curtis.
"Sorry, the other group needed the space."
"Couldn't they wait a week?" I asked.
"No, they knew you were not staying here."
"Fuckers."

I gathered a few things, and sorted through the rest. It was all unimportant now. I didn't need copies of policy. I didn't need procedures. I didn't need anything. I took binders that had followed me from one end of Iraq to the other, and summarily tossed them into the trash.

One day I met the man from corporate that was completing the last details of our project. It was accidental. I hadn't wanted to meet him. I didn't want the exposure. But there he was, explaining the next steps in the process. As we talked, I broke down. I was so disappointed in the fact that my partner on the project had screwed me in the end, and what we had produced was less than I thought it should be. Everything was messed up, and I simply did not have the energy to fix it. I apologized. I knew I could do better. Or, at least at one point I could. He looked at me sympathetically, as tears rolled down well-worn tracks on my face. I didn't even care. It didn't even matter.

Curtis left for R&R, and I had the office to myself. When everything had been packed, I looked around. His stuff was piled in boxes on his desk. We were all transitional. We were all just bodies. No one really cared what we wanted, there was no such thing as a career here. We performed a function, then moved on.

I got up, closing and locking the door. I opened up my old emails from David, and collapsed onto the desk in tears. He loved me once. He said he did. The messages were filled with sweetness, anticipation, hope, dreams. I tried to read through them, but the agony of what was no longer there made it impossible to continue. I shut down the computer, turned off the light, closed the blinds, and wept. For the next eight days, I sat in there, weeping, hiding, wishing incoming would finally do what I lacked the courage to do. No one asked what I was doing. No one said anything at all. Every three hours I got up to go to the bathroom, and made no effort to hide that I had been crying. It didn't matter. I didn't care what they thought. My life was over. On the ninth day, I took my one box and my computer, stood up, turned off everything, locked the door, and walked out of my promising future. It was all over.


I sat in the trailer the first week with a new employee who refused to do any paperwork because he hadn't yet received training. I explained that the training course here would provide little help to what his duties actually were. He ignored me. He had no background in the field, but had been brought into the group by Tom. And was getting paid more than I was. I tried not to resent him, but I did.

He spent hours each day arranging pictures of dead Iraqis on his computer, earnestly reading his pocket-sized bible and praising GW and our fine war. The days became a blur of tense boredom. I sank deeper into my private hell, unable to escape, unable to think, unable to breathe. I checked my email, but nothing ever came. No message from David saying that he had made an awful mistake and wanted me back. No invitation to meet him in Dubai. No apology for what he had done, no request for an address to mail me the money he still owed. I stifled my tears, breaking down the minute my colleague left for lunch each day. As the July heat rolled into August, he left for R&R and I was left mercifully alone.

Each day I wept. Each day the pain got no better. Days would pass where I would do nothing but cry, then return to my hooch and cry all night. My eyes were permanently swollen. I barely slept, barely ate, barely moved. Sleep was hopeless. At most, I got three hours. I became a zombie, rising earlier and earlier, until one day I just stayed up straight through. The circles under my eyes grew with each passing moment, and my hair began to fall out in clumps. I tried to care, but really didn't. I looked at the heaps of hair on the bathroom floor each day and felt only a distant curiosity.

I would drive around the camp, sobbing, trying to avoid driving past the places that held the memories most dear. I was being ripped apart, every day, all day, all night. I did not feel as though I would survive. I did not feel anything rallying inside of me. I just gave up. I didn't care if they fired me. I didn't give a shit what happened from then on.

No one knew. It was not something that I could share. Only one person back home knew what had happened, and she worried that I was having a nervous breakdown. I laughed. How fucking perfect is that??? The prospect of my own personal destruction amidst the hellish backdrop of Iraq seemed divinely poetic. I was on my own. I had made my bed, and had to sleep in it. So I started to blog, and created 'lost in daveland', the sad homage to my lost love. Blog or die.

As I wrote, I wondered what he was doing, imagining all the projects that he said he needed to complete. I wondered if he was getting along with his wife, if he was screwing her the way he had longed to do in all those months over here. I wondered if he had planted tomatoes, if he had canned them, if he had a zillion cold beers on his deck in front of the lake. And I wondered if he had returned to work, back to the job he hated, back to the life he despised, back to the routine that had so sucked the very joy from his soul. But to me, he was as good as dead. To me, he had cut me off as though I was nothing. There was no explanation. One day he was there, the next day he was not. To me, his actions were violent in a chicken shit way, wanting to strike at my heart without the annoyance of personal accountability. He was good at that.

I could avoid him no longer. I could not do this. I was dying, and I knew it. I simply needed to hear his voice.

By September, he had returned to work and I found his email address. I shook as I typed. I was terrified he would be angry. I was frozen in fear when I hit send. I knew he would not respond. Why would he? Why would he need to after he had so efficiently eliminated me from his life? Why would he ever face what he had done?

And then he answered. His email was short, abrupt, but opened the door a crack. He did not want to speak with me, he did not want to hear my voice. So we emailed a couple of times. And for the first time in three months, I went to sleep without crying.

I spoke with him for the first time last week. I called, my hands shaking when I dialed. When he answered, my breath caught. His voice is my comfort, even after what he has done to me. I fall into his soft voice, remembering what it was like to hold him. We danced around the obvious. But we talked. And for the first time in months, I have again laughed. David does that to me.

Yet I listen to him, about how much he wants to leave his wife, about how he wants her to be the one to leave, about how she discovered our affair. I have heard it all before. There is no way I can know what the truth is. There is no way I can know when he is lying to me. I know he is, but I have chosen to ignore it. He says he wants out, but when I send him emails with links to support, he doesn't lift a finger to contact them. He says she is violent, but when I give him phone numbers to call, he doesn't. I send him links to books, something he can read to gain some insight into why he needs to stay in a relationship that doesn't work. He won't read them. I send him questions to evaluate what he thinks and feels, and he blows them off.

He says that she may leave, that she can't "get over" what happened, yet he still won't allow me to do anything that would reveal that he is again speaking to me. He hides his emails to me from her. He won't call me, it would show up on the bill.

He has not apologized. He really doesn't understand what he has done, how much he has hurt me. And I can't understand why he doesn't get it, why he doesn't realize how powerful love is, how one is broken when it is lost, and the fact that he was worth it to me, that he was that important in my life, that he could have been my future. The only way it makes sense is when I conclude that he has never really felt love, not that kind. Not the honest kind, not the one that is soft, juicy, warm, trusting, and comforting. Not the kind that gets up in the middle of the night to get ice cream for your sore throat. Not the kind that holds your hand when you hurt. Not the kind that listens with rapture to the incredibly boring details of your job. Not the kind that drives you to become more than you are, to grow, to learn, to meet new people. Not the kind that fixes your favorite dinner even when you are an asshole. Not the kind that celebrates the anniversary of the first night you made love to eachother. Not the kind that changes your entire life, making you want to hug strangers on the street. Not the kind that carries you through, from here to the bitter end, always supporting, always trusting, always caring, always loving.

When a conversation goes well, when I think he actually may be ready to leave, I start feeling the same old love. The one that never died. The one that I could not kill for the life of me. I start dreaming of working together again, of traveling together again. I start dreaming of lives where we would be happy, and together. I cannot stop myself, no matter how irrational it is.

He actually spoke of returning to Iraq, saying he missed it. When he said that, almost in passing, I felt disgust. He had callously thrown us away, all to return home, all to rush back to the life he said was killing him. How was I to feel, knowing that he hated her, but she was the better choice then to remain with me? He made the decision, blaming other things, but it was his own cowardice that drove him, his own fear of change, his own inability to accept responsibility for his life. He tossed me out of his life, like garbage. He hated Iraq, all he wanted was to return home. Back to the predictable, back to the safety of knowing exactly what his life would be like forever. Even if his life would be one of misery.

But I knew he would want to come back. It is inside of us. It is a craving for growth, discovery, truth. It is needing more than others do, needing more excitement, needing more intellectual stimulation. Needing to see the exotic, needing to feel, touch, smell the world. I knew when he left that the decision would kill his soul. I knew he needed Iraq like I did, just like I did. We hated it, while loving every minute.

Daveland.