It began with a screen.
Just a screen with a bright light
between two people
who had no idea
that words could travel so far.
You were there,
somewhere beyond my reach,
and I was here,
living an ordinary life
until your words
found their way into my heart.
At first,
you were only a name.
Then a voice through videos available online.
Then a face on pictures you shared.
I began looking for
whenever my phone lit up.
Then somehow,
without warning,
you became someone
I waited for.
Someone I missed.
Someone I prayed for.
Someone whose absence
could change the entire feeling
of my day.
We fell in love
without ever having the things
most people take for granted.
No hands intertwined.
No arms around each other.
No kisses stolen in quiet places.
No waking up beside one another.
No feeling your heartbeat
against mine.
And yet somehow,
you reached my heart
without ever touching my skin.
That's the miracle
and the cruelty
of what we became.
A love born through a screen
that somehow became
too real for the screen to contain.
I began imagining
the day distance would finally surrender.
The day I would see you
walking toward me.
The day I wouldn't have to say
"I wish you were here,"
because you would be.
I imagined
what your arms would feel like.
What it would be like
to finally touch your face.
To hear your voice.
To look into your eyes
and know that the man
I've been loving from a distance
was finally standing
right in front of me.
I held onto that day.
I think my heart
built a whole future around it.
And then...
everything changed.
A mission.
Another deployment.
Another distance.
And then came the words
I never wanted to hear:
Five years.
Five years.
God...
How do you measure
five years
when you are already struggling
with the distance of today?
How do I tell my heart
that the man it longs to touch
may be somewhere far away
for five more years?
Five birthdays.
Five Christmases.
Five summers.
Five winters.
Five years of watching
the world move forward
while the love inside me
stands still,
waiting for you.
Five years
without knowing
what your hand feels like in mine.
Five years
without your arms around me.
YOU ARE READING
WHEN TOMORROW BECAME UNCERTAIN
Non-FictionA poem about the devastating reality of loving someone whose circumstances suddenly seem to be pulling them even farther away. The central pain will be "How do I promise forever when I don't even know if I can survive years of waiting for a love I'v...
