For a time we don't see each other. I spend time at my apartment with Abe. We go out, we meet girls, I go on dates, I drink. I stop writing. I consume myself with the day-to-day, the armor of the unintentionally single man. 

At counseling she deliberately looks good. She deliberately speaks of the men she has seen, but is affectionate. She is happy, and I don't know whether at those moments it is because she is near me, or because the rest of the time she is not. 

In a way, we are both happier. The time alone. No obligation of feigning a relationship that has been tattered since the war. For a brief moment, I think I know what it is to feel like a 27 year old, and it feels good. Weightless.

On a hard day, she invites me over, and I oblige. I wonder at the sanity of it, but we are Homer and Cassie, and sanity is not a function of our relationship. 

We linger in the usual places. Around the kitchen counter with glasses of wine. On the sofa by the television. We don't linger on the front steps of her apartment because I have stopped smoking.

Her place is cleaner. She is more organized. There are no dishes and I wonder at this because before I cleaned, I organized, I took care. In the simplest way, I am proud, and afraid.

I go home that night, but I see her again.

We sleep together. The carnal bits of me come out and she indulges. We fight brutally, all bruises and sweat. We fuck. We parry, dodge, embrace, attack, and silently console.  

I lie in her bed one night and she curls against me the way she only does after sex. The fan whirls above me. I have hope. I am hopeful. But the hope, where it was once unfettered, is tied with grief. I know it is fleeting because with her, it is always fleeting, rising and setting with the moon. In the morning, she will touch me differently. In the morning, the tenderness will go like the dew, up into nothing. I curse the hope.

In the morning I wake up and she is gone. It is hot. I loathe putting on the same clothes from the night before in my own apartment, the walk to my own place, changing and then going to work. I step in the shower, wash, and exit. I go to her jewelry box and search for a q-tip and in the drawer I find a gun instead.

It is small and unremarkable, carefully placed in the jewelry box where she keeps her wedding ring and the necklace I gave her. I don't know why it is here. I know who gave it to her, a man she knew from deployment. I am not bothered by any of this. Guns are common, more common an accessory in the military than rings or bracelets.

 I am bothered that she does not tell me.  I am bothered that there are things she does not tell me, not because I want to know, but because she lives in secrets, in folds of the night that I am tired of trying to penetrate. In the Army, in war, guns are meant to keep others at a distance, a show of force. I see no difference now, not in the weapon, but in the secrecy, words kept so that she can shoot them at any second should a threat arise. 

I am tired of war, and only want peace.