by Lucas Maas
The cool breeze off the San Franciscan Bay rustles my jacket and the flags hanging from the masts of my wife’s Coast Guard cutter. The cutter shines in the California sun, the sun’s warmth radiating off the newly painted white hull. My wife is leaving again, departing for yet another four-month patrol. She and her shipmates will glide through the ocean, leaving no reminder of their presence but the ones left in the hearts and on the minds of the loved ones they’ll leave behind.
Yet, an all-too-familiar feeling creeps back into the chasm of my understanding, a chemical concoction of both relief and despair. I had felt this when I was in my wife’s shoes, a young Marine, eager to leave the world I knew for one I didn’t. I’d look back at my wife before my departure and feel the relief of real-world burdens and the despair brought on by homesickness and guilt for leaving. What relieved this was the excitement of difference, the insatiable desire to see borders beyond my own, to live many lives.
I had once thought that being the one to leave was the easier position to be in rather than being left behind, but as I see the fluttering of my wife’s eyelids as she combats the unwavering propulsion of tears, I am humbled — understanding that this notion could be both true and untrue at the same time. Don’t cry, babe. You’re going to make me cry. We’ve got this, she’d say before gripping both my hands, subtly shaking them as if to expedite the message. Take care of our fur babies.
I will be her port, the one she will long for in her dreams upon the waves. The role of the military spouse holds a billet of its own. And I had seen that many aren’t up to the task. While deployed, the Marine fears for the sanctity of his marriage. On deployments, I witnessed the unraveling of both reason and consciousness once Marines discovered that their paramours, often watching over their young children, had been unfaithful or, worse, unfaithful and financially deviant. Many Marines have woken up with broken hearts and empty bank accounts. Like Robert, my best friend and roommate. Robert was a good Marine and an even better man. He liked punk rock and carried himself with a California coolness that blended well with all personalities. He arrived with us late on our second deployment because his wife had just given birth to his son. A couple of months later, she would openly cheat on him, posting photos with another Marine holding Robert’s newborn son. When we got home, she had emptied his bank account, and his house, and starved both his dog and Robert’s will to live. On our second night back, he hung himself in our living room, now farther than he ever was while on deployment.
His death did teach me one thing though, that home means everything. For me, that means that some responsibilities go beyond the sanctity of marriage, responsibilities the spouse must own to themselves. While my wife glides through the Pacific, I must be centered and consistent despite the monotony and loneliness of existence without her. While deployed or underway, I felt the channels of my understanding reprogram at an accelerated pace. There was always a new experience to be had through the facets of food, music, art, and love — a constant carnival of indulgences from both sides of morality. While at home, as the dependent, I face a choice of purpose. I can pursue proactive productivity or allow the day to slip past at any rate Father Time desires. I make this decision every morning, reluctantly pulling myself from bed to feed the pets, walk the dog, and prepare for my day outside of the confines of my home — trying to run from any temptation to just crawl back into bed and hibernate until my wife comes home again. I wonder if she feels the same. I wonder when she slithers sideways out of her rack, also called a coffin, for her turn on Watch, if she looks back at the mangled sheets and the dented pillow, wishing she could cocoon herself until the four-month patrol was over.
It is not just mitigation of monotony that is difficult, it is being productive towards maintaining intimacy with my wanderlust Coastie. A lot of service members and their spouses are very fortunate to have regular communicative access to each other. For the Coastie and their spouse, that proves to be a hurdle in itself. On the specific model of cutter my wife is stationed to, there are usually six females in their berthing with a single laptop connected to the ship’s wifi, so being able to contact someone is equivalent to sending snail mail. I could send an email to my wife and she wouldn’t have an opportunity to read or respond until days later — another anchor to bear. Still, I’d write an email every day.
Hey babe, how are you? How’s boat life going?
And she’d respond, I’m fine, I’m fine. Just need to get off of this ship already. It’s my first time logging on today, maybe if I were able to talk to you more often I’d feel a little better cause you keep me sane.
Reading those words pains me, making me feel helpless against the struggles she endures. I feel like I am being Chinese waterboarded when she tells me of the harassment she and the other women suffer on board, unable to escape the floating metal confines of their existence, trapped inside with tension and fear. Each admission of her discomfort while underway falls on my head like a single drop while I remain restrained, unable to act.
Before her cutter passes under the Golden Gate Bridge during her departure, I am already planning her return. I want to make her life on solid ground different than it was on the boat, giving her personal space and not serving chicken for the first two weeks of being home. I choose to incentivize my time and reaffirm my purpose by organizing and fantasizing about her homecoming. I imagine I am already picking up flowers for her and grabbing her long, green sea bags off her shoulders to toss in the back of my car to leave unpacked for the next week. She’ll look at me with her brown eyes and they’ll well up with memory and alleviation. But it’s not time yet. Instead, I’ll be home, searching for comfort in between the covers of a book, hoping answers sprout from simply staring at my lonely typewriter and seeking peace with each stroke of the paintbrush on a 28mm figurine.
All the while, she may be experiencing a fantasia of individual development whilst I wilt and wither, longing for the sea to carry her back to me. It is easy to fall into this well of despair, floundering for reasons to stay attached to this unconventional companionship.
A part of me wishes we could trade places, to go back to me leaving while she stays behind. That way I may be relieved of this daunting duty to weather the storms at home, alone, in a dinghy of loneliness. When her ship finally disappears, the dark silhouette of the mast falling off the edge of the world, I suppress that notion, realizing that neither of us is sacrificing more than the other. She, like I once did, will wake up on the crests of the ocean or some foreign sands with an emptiness unquenchable by everything but homecoming.
When she returns, I will greet her again, with the warm remembrance of home through my own perseverance. The lapse in reality, the feeling that being home doesn’t feel real, will dissipate at the welcoming of her family. She will be reminded through the loving embrace of her family that things haven’t changed that much since being away, and we’ll both find comfort in our efforts to make that so.
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Lucas Maas is a husband, an author, a United States Marine Corps veteran, and an MFA candidate at Saint Mary’s College of California. He concedes that his time in the military helped him see the world and his time at Saint Mary’s College has helped him better understand it. He resides in the Bay Area with his dashing wife, a Coast Guard servicemember, and two loving pets, composing essays about male adolescence, addiction, and the military and veteran experience.
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