Don't you wanna stay here a little while...

So, today was the day. He's gone. Hopefully I can through this post without loosing my cool.

Mark's family was here the past two days, so that's why I've been AWOL on here lately, as well as Mark has been off work since Wednesday... so I've been a bit busy, bigger fish to fry than writing a blog, obviously. Of course, Mark waiting until yesterday to get all his gear ready, buy all his little here's and there's, pretty much everything to tie him over (minus care packages that I can send him) for the next 10 months.

His Aunt, Uncle, and cousin said their goodbyes yesterday, after dinner. After everybody left Mark went and repacked all his things, to add the other things he had gotten that day to the mix, while I played Pokemon like a boss on his new DS. Apparently everybody is nerding out this boat ride, and playing pokemon (L shaped hand, meet forehead.) After he got done packing, my brother busted out his beard trimmer, and I went to town trying to give Mark a fade. He forgot to go to the barber shop, and with Marine Corp tradition, your first deployment you get shaved. This is Mark's second, so I really wanted to at least try and let him keep his hair so he isn't looked at and automatically put into the "boot" category by everybody else. He didn't care, but I just wanted him to have his hair. Well I did a pretty good job for a first timer, but obviously you can only do too much with a bear trimmer lol... I ended up just shaving it all off.

After that we "went to bed." No, those quotations are not of a sexy nature. We just laid together. He was only going to get 4 hours of sleep at that point anyway, so it was too hard to actually fall asleep. Of course there were some tears, nothing too bad, but it was bound to happen our last night of laying together.

Eventually we did fall asleep for a bit, but we were woken up soon enough by his alarm. Everything was fine and dandy with leaving. We took some pictures, and then our roommate and his wife left. Thats when it went down hill.

It's actually happening; he's really leaving. I'm going to be "alone" for 10 months. Without him.

We cried. Hard. Together. Then we gathered ourselves up, only to loose it again. Finally, it was time for goodbye. Que more heart crushing tears. I can still remember his face as he walked across the living room and just fell into me on the chair. It broke my heart to see him break. I don't think I will ever forget the look in his eyes. It was the worst feeling ever, knowing that there was nothing I could do to stop him from hurting. I was hurting myself, but all I wanted to do was keep it together for him. I'm pretty sure my entire neighborhood knows he's gone now, though. Our good bye on the front porch... in the rain. He drove to base. As soon as he left the drive way I walked inside and just let out all my pain. It was so hard not to loose it that much with him there. After he left I just had to scream & kick & cry. "Oh, God." I couldn't stop yelling "Oh, God."

aaaaaand.... I've lost it. I'm going to take a shower soon and really let it out, then go to bed... even though I technically only woke up like 6 hour ago. I got a call around 9:30pm. He said his phone was dying, and he was going to unpack and then call me back, but I'm thinking since he hasn't called back by now he fell asleep after unpacking. He's got a lot of people to call anyway, and I know he said he was going to call his mom, so maybe he still will call. I don't know, either way I'll be okay. I'll probably get my last stable phone call tomorrow, and after that the communication is really going to go down hill. Then we're back to emails and port calls (even thought his time they wont be hitting nearly as many ports from the sounds of it.)

As my friend Jaclyn said... time to kick Deployment number two's ass "Like a boss."