Chip left this morning for a business trip to Chicago. I say this morning because he did indeed leave our house in the a.m., though he just arrived in the Other Windy City about half an hour ago. A trip that should have taken four hours--including travel time to the airport--wound up taking almost 12, because what would modern-day air travel be without some excruciating delays?
Anyway, the important thing is that I got the crucial text message informing me that the plane had landed safely. For all the traveling the two of us have done, I am still quite uneasy when one of us has to travel alone. I am also a total loss when it comes to goodbyes, especially when it involves my husband.
Chip and I met almost 15 years ago (good lord, really?) and spent the first three years of our dating lives living through that peculiar hell known as the LDR--long-distance relationship. When we first started dating, in 1994, we managed to see each other about every four months. We caught a break in the summer of 1995 when we got to go back to Europe with the Montana Youth Choir. The rehearsals and trip meant that we got to spend almost six weeks together. That fall, he left California to go to Michigan State University for grad school, while I continued on for my last year at the University of Montana. That year we were able to see each other about every two months, which was a vast improvement but still led to increasing suckiness every time we had to leave.
By the time I started grad school in Connecticut in 1996, we were down to a month between visits--and the kind of soul-crushing goodbyes that poisoned at least the last half of each trip. To this day I have an automatic tear reflex when I walk into an airport. When Chip got his job at UMass-Amherst in 1997, we found a way to see each other--and I'm not exaggerating here--more or less every day, even though we lived 90 miles apart and had only one car. We finally made it to the same state after we got married.
All of which is a long, long way of explaining why the two of us don't spent all that much time in separate states/countries anymore. I know plenty of wonderful couples who endure long or frequent separations, but I just can't be one of them. We did that for long enough in the early years.
Only four more days.