Homeless

I miss my husband.  He’s been in Turkey for a solid week, and I miss him.  What’s funny is that he’s rarely home even when he’s here but somehow not here across town is totally different from not home half a world away.  His presence is comfort to me.  He is home.  So when he’s gone….where am I?  It’s why I feel so unsettled.  He is my home and he’s in a place whose name I’m not sure how to pronounce correctly. What does that make the place where I am?  I’m not sure.

He calls us every day around lunchtime. I lean back in my chair and close my eyes.  I can picture his face as he tells me about the events of his day.  I can hear the exhaustion and I know how his eyes look. I can hear the smile in his voice when we talk about the children, and I know the smile lines are there at the corner of his mouth.  When he laughs, I can see the way his cheeks move and his eyes crinkle.  I know how he looks.  After 16 years together, he is so familiar to me that I don’t need to see him to know how he looks.

There is something to be said for the occasional traveling that he does.  His warm presence is somehow less noticeable when he is here all the time.  It takes its absence to remind me of exactly how dear it is to me.  In the quiet of the evening, when the children are in bed and we are reading side by side, I take that comfort for granted too often.  On nights like tonight, when all the children are in bed and it’s just me alone downstairs with the sounds of the dishwasher and the snoring dog, I miss even his silence.

One more week and then he will come home.  I will wrap my arms around him, and bury my face into his neck, and home will have returned to me.