Jun
It was a just a few short weeks until my redeployment home when Ramona started chiseling away at the granite boulder which encased my heart. Okay, so maybe it was me who contacted her, and maybe she didn’t even start liking me until only a few days go. But a start is a start, and this is where mine begins.
Ramona and I met a long, long time ago. In a land where being a smart, good looking white kid just wasn’t enough. Where rap battles and your momma jokes rattled the dingy cinder block hallways. Where fubu was the dress code, and the vagrant youth its enforcer. Yup, we met in high school. And just like every other kid in high school, I was a complete wreck. I knew about as much what to do with myself as I knew about what my mom was making for dinner. It was during these first few years where Ramona and I had spent most of our time together. We weren’t together as boyfriend and girlfriend, or even really as just friend and friend. She was the tall, good looking, confident white girl that ate little annoying boys for breakfast, and then spit them out broken men. I was the new kid who played the tuba. After seeing her wreck man after man with no mercy whatsoever I knew I was in love. But I didn’t know how to distinguish myself from the hordes of other dorky white kids. How do I separate myself and grab her attention, if even for a split second, so as to have but a chance at such a horrible fate as though who fell before me? So I started brainstorming, hours and hours of utilizing every critical thinking skill I had developed during my education. Then one day it hit me as if it could of been the most natural of all solutions. I’ll just annoy the shit out of her until she falls for me. Well maybe my ideas were not the best but my plan certainly did one thing, and that was quickly earn a reputation that I’m now working hard to get rid of. Oh well. What else could I of done?
Fast forward to now. Looking back it almost seems like an eternity ago. The hard lessons life brought along these past fast moving years have transformed me from the naive kid I was into my own grown up version of the Ramona I knew back in high school, cool and confident. Of course minus the boobs and man-eating part. In reality the challenges and hardships in my life after school had made me become the kind of person I always wanted to be, and continue to work towards to this day. Ramona sees these changes as if they had occurred overnight. Still thinking about the seventeen year old kid she left behind to go to college, and not the seventeen year old kid that sacrificed his friends and family to go be a part of something much bigger than himself. The kid who lost his youth to the Army, and dealt with everything it brought along with it.
I’m not trying to sound bitter, because I’m not. I love what I do and would do it all over again if given the chance. So, Ramona, I just don’t know any other way to help you understand why I’m not that same kid anymore. You don’t like it when I talk about my experiences, well mostly the cool scary ones, so it’s hard for me to explain why maybe I feel certain ways about things. It scares you, I get that, and I know you worry about me. I know you worry that the more I like you the harder it will be for me to leave again, or the harder it will be for me while I’m here in Tennessee. While I don’t know if that’s true or not, I do know one thing, you’d be worth the extra misery.