By: Mrs. Mishi Harari
There’s a place in Army spouse life where time and space do not exist. It’s a place without description, yet its distinction is real. It’s when you move to a new duty station. It’s when your husband deploys. It’s when you can’t figure out how you’ll ever get back to living a normal life after thousands of miles of traveling and eating peanut butter sandwiches three times a day for weeks on end. It’s a place that holds you in, with your pain, your joy, and all the tears that come along with both extremes of emotion. It’s the hug that you give your neighbor, whom you have only just met, as she cries in your arms after sending her husband off for a nine-month rotation. And it’s precisely that hug that fills this unnamed spot of the Army spouse. You hug until she’s ready to let go. And from that moment on, you share a bond with each other that, like this space, cannot be expressed or explained in any tangible form. It just simply is. Those who have given and received, helped fill someone’s space while they filled yours, can appreciate the emptiness and the nourishing of that unmarked expanse. It’s where the beauty of connecting to another human being lies within, waiting for its time to spill out and permeate the depths of its surroundings.
Originally published in the Shavous 5783 of the Jewish American Warrior.
