The soldier and I watched the war movie over the weekend, nothing like hearing the blow by blow from someone who was there. “What were you thinking here?” I could ask this kind of stuff and get an answer. Plus he’s so candid. He does not give me the pc version but the real version and by the time the movie ended I was somewhat stunned and I was very freakishly humbled.

Now this might sound like I am some sort of arrogant over-inflated freak but if it does, I don’t think you get my meaning. Of course that right there might serve as more evidence of my arrogance so some of you can see I am damned if I do, and damned if I don’t but I feel like doing… offering this, so I am going to.

I felt humbled and sort of displaced by the movie. It was a dramatization of a day in the life, his life which is just so extraordinary. That his life is extraordinary is no secret but I internalized this at a deeper level that I had before and this is when the lights went on.

Now I have a hell of a lot of trouble with love and war as it is. For example, I write the soldier’s son about love a lot. I think love is important and he’s got a stellium in Libra so I imagine he agrees but after I send this stuff, pages and pages of it, it dawns on me that he is in Iraq in the middle of a war and I wonder if what I sent was appropriate after all. ::sigh::

So anyway, here’s this astonishing movie and here I think I am a big deal in the soldier’s life. And I DO think this. I think this, I totally admit that I think this but after seeing this movie last night all of the sudden I could see why people who know him from this era of his life (Special Forces) tend to think so little of me. They discount me terrifically and the other night it was easy to see why. You kissed him when you were teenagers? What the hell is that? Do you know what this man has done?

You can see the humbling in that and thinking and feeling this way, I decided to tell him. We were both impacted by the movie and I told him one of the effects it had was that I felt very insignificant in his life. And while that may sound like a prod for a compliment it was anything but. It was just the fact of the moment. “I just can’t understand how you could be doing stuff like this… nothing but stuff like this and have a thought of me at all. Are you sure you collected those songs? I just don’t see how…”

“You’re anything but insignificant,” he said.

I stared at him to see what he was saying or if he was lying because he does lie about some things sometimes and I saw him read my face.

“P, how could I hear this song…” Sitting in front of the computer at the time, he stopped to pull up a song on YouTube. “How could I hear this song and think of anyone or anything but you?”

He played the Gin Blossoms, “Hey Jealousy” and I shrugged. He raised an eyebrow and smiled.

“Okay, how could I think of this song and not think of you?”

He played Greg Kihn’s The Breakup Song and I laughed. In front of the computer, he glanced over at me lying on the bed and judged the situation. “I can see I am going to have to bring out the big guns,” he said.

“Big guns?”

Next thing I know, Barry Manilow is wailing, Mandy, and I roared. “You came and you gave without taking… and I sent you away, oh Mandy…” Barry wailed.

“Um… okay, I think I get it,” I said. “These are your songs…”

He played “My Valentine” from Love Story.

I shook my head.

“P, do you remember when we met?” he said. “Do you remember? I am talking the very first time we saw each other.”

“I remember.”

“Well I remember too and my memory of it is crystalline. I have a crystalline memory of meeting you - P we met and we looked into each others eyes, do you remember? Deeply. We looked deep into each others eyes and at that moment… at that moment that is crystalline in my mind something happened to me. I got hit by The Thunderbolt. I loved you and I have just loved you ever since. My whole life long I have loved you, it has never let up for a minute so if that’s what you call insignificant…”