Better as a Memory

Who doesn't have fun at Disney right? The readers are now thinking two separate thoughts, the single and married women along with single guys are thinking that it is a pretty romantic place while the married men are thinking that I'm an idiot for taking her there. Yup, I was an idiot.

Hindsight makes it easier to distinguish the important details. The same pressure that she felt with my leaving was now driving her towards the thoughts of leaving her family. But remember, I'm an idiot who doesn't really understand female emotions so I'm just my happy go lucky moron self, enjoying seeing Mickey and Minnie and wandering around Epcot. She was clearly frustrated and being snippy but I just put it off as female problems because that it what guys do. She had a zit on her face and I thought she was just really being self-conscious about that.

The only real blow up happened when we went kayaking down the river. She critiqued my paddling form, mainly because it was inefficient and sucked. An issue that you have when you date athletic women is that in their mind's they are just as good athletically as a male. This becomes a problem when the male works in a physically demanding job and is bigger, stronger and much faster. So like the immature moron most guys are, I just paddle as fast as I can and I destroy her in the return route.

This obviously leads to her being in admiration of my physical prowess, so she pulls her panties off and begged me to take her right there on top of the kayak like I was the son of Odin himself.

Just kidding, she told me to go fuck myself.

I apologized about a billion times that evening for being a dipshit. We went to a nice comedy club and had a fun time. This was back when Disney had an island for adults so there were a couple of things to do in the evening. We seemed to be ok, at least to me.

We had planned the engagement party to occur two months before the wedding. The pressure of marriage and moving away was getting to her, but I still didn't understand how badly. She talked about how she wished we could just be married by a Justice of the Peace and not do the church ceremony so we could have it done with and just start our lives together.

I flew up for the engagement party and the stress level was high. My next training was going to have limited contact with the outside world, so no phone calls or emails. Getting married is already high stress but when you can't talk to your fiancée it really doesn't help calm the nerves. We each invited friends and family to the party and we had a great time, from what I can remember of it. I remember taking a drink and I remember waking up the next day.

That the drink was 30 minutes into an eight-hour engagement party become a problem.

There are certain moments in your life when you make a poor decision. Some times the poor decision is clear. You go left when you should have gone right. You say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Prior to this, I'd drunk hard liquor before in obscene amounts and never had an issue. I was thinking that a season drinker was going to have this type of problem. To this day, this is the only black out that I've ever had when drinking.

The poor decision I made was to invite a friend of mine who thought it would be hilarious to put something in my drink. Because when a guy is getting married, nothing is funnier then slipping him something to make him act out of character in front of friends and family. Maybe he was pissed because my life was going great and I was getting everything I wanted. Who knows, who really cares. I haven't talked to him since and probably still doesn't know why.

The next day she was rightfully super pissed. I didn't know what had happened so I couldn't help fix the problem that had been created. How do you make it better?

An already high stress level went through the roof. Even Captain Clueless could tell that things were bad.

I flew back to work and we were going to have one last weekend before the next training started for a last weekend together before two months of silence prior to the wedding weekend so she flew down.

It was clear from the second she walked through the airport gate.

We were done.

That is still one of the worst days of my life. You could tell she was broken up and hurting when she gave me back the engagement ring. She told me that I wasn't worth it. Giving up her dreams and leaving her family behind wasn't worth it.

I'm far from an emotional person. I don't cry when family member or a cherished pet dies, but I cried when I brought her to the airport. A huge part of my life was ending and there wasn't anything I could do about it. She gave the standard platitudes about still being friends. I knew it was all bullshit at this point and that she didn't want me in her life anymore. I don't know if I was crying because she wasn't going to be part of my life anymore or because I had known that it was going to happen and could only watch as it did.

She asked me not to call her and to give her space.

Then she flew away and my heart died.

I went to my training and quickly failed out because I wasn't mentally ready for it. Too much free time to think about the recent catastrophe. Suddenly I was free again while I waited for my next training. My two best friends at the time down there also broke up with their fiancées around the same time, so we also started drinking the minute we got off work. We'd finish off a 30 pack and just bust each other's balls.

Great therapy thanks to Bud Light.

I went back home for Thanksgiving and went out with some friends. As I was getting out of the car, one of the lenses on my glasses fell out so I couldn't see anything. We visited the local dive and of course Marie was there. I could sort of make out her face as we walked by and I wished her a Happy Thanksgiving. Maybe if I could have actually seen her I would have gone over and talked to her but I was still pretty hurt and being blind didn't really help.

That is the last time I saw her.

A month later I came back for Christmas and was hanging out with some family members and drunk called Sue. I told her how badly I was hurting that I would like to talk to Marie. Marie called me back the next morning and asked what I wanted to talk about.

We chatted for a bit and talked about how we were doing. She asked what I had said to her on Thanksgiving Eve and I told her just Happy Thanksgiving.

A week later I flew to Germany. Two weeks after that I landed in Kuwait. The deployment was challenging and stressful. Luckily being in charge keeps your mind occupied so I didn't have time to be scared. Firefights can be fun as long as none of your guys get hurt, drag racing your Bradley into oncoming traffic is a unique experience. Even with an extension, the deployment ended and it was back to Germany.

I knew she wasn't going to be there. There was no way for her to know when I was getting in since I didn't even know. It wasn't a rational thought but her not being there hurt bad. It is still one of the emptiest feelings that I've ever had. Because of everything else that had happen in the timing since I hadn't had the opportunity to accept the end of the relationship.

One weekend a few weeks later I was hanging out with friends in Frankfurt and ran into a couple of my soldiers. They wanted to do a shot with me which made me feel pretty good. Each one of these guys had a special meaning to me from our deployment and it really meant a lot to one of them whom I'd helped out and got my ass chewed bad over it, so I had a single shot with them. That was the first shot I'd had since the engagement party debacle.

It is also the last shot I've had in the decades since.

Months after I got back I got a chance to visit my parents. They had been storing a bunch of my old stuff including the letters we had shared. Finding the letters brought back a lot of the old pain. I read each one just one more time and then I burnt them all. Being alone at the welcome home ceremony had brought finality to our relationship that even the returning of the engagement ring didn't bring.

The defining relationship of my life up to that point was over.

What we had was gone and at this point I was finally ready to move on.

I didn't date much afterwards. The next girl I dated barely spoke English.

The one after her I married. I had played my last losing hand, the seeking was done. I'd found the one really meant for me.

What I came to realize finally was that Marie was the never the problem. She was never the issue. It was always me. As human beings we tend to want to put our failures on other people. We didn't make the mistakes, someone else took the dream away from us. "If only" becomes words we hang on to for what could have been. We rationalize how others steal our lives instead of owning up that most of our failures are of our own making. It's hard to admit that the path of our lives are a collection of our own victories and fuckups.

Our own choices get us to where we we are.

I know I failed her. We wasted years because I was too scared to go up to a beautiful girl and tell her that I thought the stars shined just for her. I failed to realize what she was going through. I failed to be there for her when her friends told her she was making a huge mistake marrying me and moving away. I failed to let her know that her dreams mattered and that her goals weren't going to be left behind by mine. She need the affirmation that she was my partner and that her dreams were just as important as mine. I failed to give that comfort to her when others were telling her that I wouldn't.

She made me realize that I didn't have the right frame of mind when I was younger and that I wasted years on a stupid philosophy of not wanting to put anyone through the pain of me leaving. She rightfully called it foolish and through the years of caring for her I could understand how I had gone wrong and what I needed to do to fix it. I learned to let people make their own choices and decisions. Because what I may view as a sacrifice, others may be willing to look beyond the risk as the reward of going through those challenges to be with the right person.

Looking back I know I became a better person for her having been in my life. She helped me see the gaps in who I was and made me take a look at the person I could be. She was the key to me changing my mindset and opening myself up to let others in.

It took a while but I finally understood. When the opportunity to find the woman to spend the rest of my life with arrived I grabbed on to it and ensured that she didn't get away. I put my chips in the middle and played the hand to win. My wife and I have the uncomfortable conversations that couples need to have to survive and thrive. We don't ignore issues and hope they go away. We take challenges head on together as a team and we are better for it.

I don't know if I was better as a memory than as her man for Marie. But I know my life was better with her as a memory in mine.