Friday, August 2, 2013

Viking Thanks

This isn't any one event from today, but more the last year.

This is my last day seeing Viking for awhile. I have one of those 60-hour shifts, so I'll actually miss her leaving - she's going to go spend a week with her family, and then headed to Italy for two years.

Viking is the woman who knows me best from the last two years, by virtue of us having spent the most time together. We have almost completely different backstories (realized Tuesday that she and the Gentleman have almost identical backstories, actually), and through two very different roads came out at a point where we were basically the same person. Mostly, we have the same spiritual struggles, a similar approach to males and whimsy...it's really remarkable how much we find we have in common.

Most of our family doesn't see this, but that may also be because Viking and I look almost nothing alike. She's fashioned rather like Merida and I'm a bit like Belle.

Even as relaxed as I am with the Gentleman, and everything he's seen in my personality, there's a level of sheer goofiness and vulnerability that I only have with Viking (likely because of the whole female thing - there is some factor of, when one is interested in having an attractive man find one attractive, one does not in his presence belt out selections from "3-2-1 Penguins!" in a tiny German hamster voice).

Bob Cratchit said at the dinner table, "It's all right, children. Life is a series of meetings and partings." While sentimental, I do think it's very possible to have had two very good (and challenging, and frustrating, and cry-on-your-shoulder...oh, yeah, we went through two deployments together) years, and to be thankful for those two years at the time of parting, and be happy for your friend as she heads off to new adventures on the other side of the world.

And I'm happy to have today with her.

(She would know this, because in honor of the occasion, I created, in the shower, a special medley, setting the lyrics from Cruella de Vil to the melody of Rum Tum Tugger, interspersed with bits of a hyper-syncopated Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The last month together has been a flair of all the things that I only bring out around her, taken to the max. She's just thrilled. :D )

There's so much to be thankful for.

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