Well, I have attempted to allow you all to post comments on here, if you so desire.  As best I can tell if you click on the time, next to my name at the bottom of each blog it takes you to a screen where you may “post comments” at the top.  This might bear some investigation.  I make no promises about it working.  Hopefully within a month or two I will have cable modem or DSL and will be able to fix these things much more easily from my home computer. 

So my roommate left for California on Tuesday.  Normally a trip to California would be something about which to rejoice, but this trip, not so much.  California is just a stop, you see, on her way to Iraq.  I am still confused about how I feel.  Not that I should necessarily feel anything.  I am not the one going, after all, so why should it matter to me? 

My ambivalence of feeling, stems from the knowledge that she and I aren’t friends, so much, as family.  While we knew each other previously to first living together three years ago, we weren’t close.  Suddenly there we were together, all the time, and we became what I could only call sisters.  But this is different than when two girlfriends call each other sisters; this was more, well, real if you can believe it.  Families aren’t friends by default you understand.  You love each other because you are family.  Hopefully you like each other too, but that isn’t a requirement.  With my roommate it is much the same relationship.  Living together has forced us to get along, and over the span of three years we have developed a mutual respect, and perhaps even love, for one another, the love of family members.  It is odd.  When she left on Tuesday morning and hugged me goodbye I believe that was the first time we had ever hugged.  That is an odd thing for two females who are as close as we are.  But we are both more male in our relationships than female.  At least stereotypically speaking.  We don’t talk about feelings so much as rant about them.  We don’t hug or do each other’s make up.  We each have our own space and that is that.  If there is a problem it is mentioned and dealt with.  If there isn’t we sit in companionable silence.  Not your two typical female roommates.

And now she is gone.  I have a new roommate to replace her absence and I love him; I know I will enjoy living with him, but it isn’t the same.  He is a friend.  She was family.  He means as much to me as she does but I can’t joke with him about periods, or yeast infections, or how my boobs look.  While we are open with each other there are certain things he simply will not understand.  I cannot walk through the door and say, “man, you ever just want a good deep dickin’?”  The dialogue will not be the same.  He can understand, but being a straight male will not really want to discuss it, and I would not ask that of him.

And the crux of it all is, while I sit in my abode missing my roommate, she will be off at war running into god knows what.  There it is.  I’ve said it.  I’m worried about her.  I do not want to spend a year hearing over the news only that “another marine was killed today” and not knowing who.  I do not want the stress of thinking where will she march today?  Will anyone blow up a car by her?  I do not want her to have to go through that.  War is somehow easier to stomach if no one you care about is involved.  If it is something removed, something seen only through pictures and read about only through third person news stories it is not so real.    Now it is suddenly, uncontrollably, in my face.  And I do not like it.  More than that I do not want my dear friend to experience it. 

The crap of it is she was already there once.  But that was a year ago before things got so messy.  That was before beheadings and car bombs and everything else.  It was no less real then, but somehow it seemed more like a game.  Or perhaps I was too young then to appreciate the gravity of the situation. 

I don’t know if this war needed to be started, but I know now it needs to be finished.  We have destroyed a country and her people for better or for worse.  I don’t want to see my roommate march off to danger and sandstorms and ugliness, but I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I condoned the abandonment of the people in Iraq.  I don’t know what the solution is.  I think perhaps there isn’t one.  We, as a country, have lumbered into quicksand and now I can only hope my roommate doesn’t have to be hurt or killed as we vainly struggle trying to get out. 

Lord and Lady guide us.  We need all the help we can get.