Our Little Love Story *NOW PUBLISHED ON AMAZON KINDLE!!*

chapter thirty three

It was finally January. I was becoming more and more excited by each passing day; hour. Jared was scheduled to be back at base in about a week. The past year had went by quicker than I had thought it would, and now we were in the home stretch, as they say. The days seemed longer and more drawn out now than they had all year. I was so excited for his return that I could barely focus in my classes. Everything was pretty much meaningless now. All that mattered was that my wait to see Jared and be in his arms again was almost over. 

My parents had left for a weeklong stay at a resort in the mountains with some of their close friends. I had wanted to go along, I mean, who in their right mind wouldn’t? But my workload was extra heavy lately, and I had a pile of unfinished work stacked on my desk waiting silently for me. I watched them back down the driveway, with Sam in the backseat, and gave a sad wave as they disappeared down our street. 

Sighing, I walked into the kitchen and dug through the cabinets until I found a can of vegetable soup to heat up in the microwave for supper. Setting the time for it to ‘cook,’ I went to the refrigerator and grabbed a soda, popping the tab with my fingernail. The microwave sounded, signaling that it was finished heating up my instant meal. Sitting down at our dining room table, I softly blew on my soup, cooling it off some. I let my thoughts wander as I stared off across the room at nothing. I pictured what Jared would look like, after not having seen him for an entire year. I imagined how we would react at the first sight of each other. I thought about what our first in person conversation would be about. 

Sipping the last of the juice from my soup bowl, I took it to the kitchen and rinsed it out in the sink. I drained the last couple of drinks from my soda can and tossed it in the recycling bin. Walking into the living room, I grabbed the remote from our coffee table and turned on the television, absentmindedly flipping through the channels, not seeing anything interesting enough to watch.

“Five hundred channels, and nothing’s on,” I muttered aloud. I flopped over onto my back and stared up at the ceiling, my thoughts still on Jared while a commercial for Tide played in the background. 

I had sent him a few ‘care packages,’ as they call them, while he had been gone. I always threw in a disposable camera, and he would never fail to send it back a few weeks later, full of pictures. Inevitably, I would hurry to the local Wal-Mart and pay the extra money to get it developed within the hour. 

I always forced myself to wait until I returned home to look through the pictures that he had taken. Once, while we were chatting on SpaceBook, he said that there were some pictures of fellow Marines, and he would explain who they were when he returned home. I eagerly anticipated hearing about his stories and adventures from Germany and being overseas on the ship he was on now. 

“But not for much longer,” I muttered to myself with a smile. Another week and he would be on an airplane bound for California. Soon after he touched down there, he would be allowed to take leave, and then I would go with his parents once more to meet him at the airport in St. Louis. 

My thoughts returned to the pictures I’d had developed from the handful of cameras that I had sent him over the last several months. There were pictures of him alone, pictures of him with fellow Marines, and pictures of scenery. Several I knew to be areas of Germany, since those cameras were returned to me before he boarded the ship. The pictures were breathtaking. If Jared hadn’t joined the military, I think he would’ve had a calling as a photographer. There were pictures of sunsets, beaches, and fields. 

I walked to my room and grabbed the box I was keeping all of his letters and pictures in, and sat down with it on my bed. I thumbed through each picture for what was probably the millionth time, and read over every single letter another time. Looking at everything spread out on my bed, my thoughts somberly returned to why I wasn’t able to go with my parents to the resort. My gaze left my ‘memorabilia’ of sorts from Jared to the stack of books and papers sitting next to my computer on my desk.