....limbo....**

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beloved LEGS....

.....I don't know why, but I feel like going for a run today....I just feel like I need to go out there and be free.....be in a wide open space....so all of me can be as big as I feel.....I try to convince you to join me but you want to strum on your guitar....we discuss whether or not my running is as a result of my compulsion to weigh a certain amount, or an unhealthy compulsion to exercise so much.....but in the end I convince you its just because I feel like it.....still....its hard for me to actually leave you.....

....I tell myself its okay for us to be separate of each other.  So I head out.  It gives me time to think.  To daydream.  To process this whirlwind I've been in.  I feel like I have been so out of control, so dizzy and in delirious haze.....I need to breathe in the fresh air and get a firm grasp on my wits about me....

.....I remember Mariannae running even with her bad knees up the hill to our house when she first saw you.....tears in her eyes out of breath to welcome you home....and tell you how happy she is you made it back in good condition.....I later asked you how you felt when she did that.....as she nearly killed herself to get to you.....

You said "I don't like to be welcomed and thanked, I just want it to be routine like we used to be."

I smile to myself because I hope secretly you realize that.....we could never be who we were....and it will never be like it was.......

I imagine that.....if I believed in Heaven and Hell, if I believed in LIMBO the only thing in life that would be similar is when these men come back from war.  To leave a hellish place only to return to where things are shiny, alive, clean, warm and loving....to accept this is where you are now, to believe that its true....its a bizarre sort of middle ground......

It must be sort of like a LIMBO.  That transition.  The time in between.  I feel as if I am in a LIMBO as well.  Amidst the holidays, before a month long trip, a homecoming....and my decision to leave the sport of boxing.

People look at me like I am making a mistake when I tell them.  In order to pursue my Olympic aspirations I would have been away preparing for competition when you came home from Afghanistan.  I try to explain that......having you return from war to nothing is not something I could ever forgive myself for.  I married you before boxing was ever in the picture.  Giving up a soul crushing sport in the name of love, to me, is a worthy and noble reason.

I have nothing left to prove to anyone.  I was an Elite Female Boxer who entered the ring with the best in the world.  Gold Medal, Olympic dreams accomplished or not.....would mean nothing on the podium next to TRUE LOVE.

And even when I try to tell people what I did, or explain why I stopped....they just don't understand....

.....its at this point in my run where, I start to panic.  My legs and feet won't cooperate with my heart and soul.  Its at this moment where, I cannot move as fast or as deeply as I want to be next to you again......its been too long and its only been minutes......

....I think that....if we live through this....we will never look back.....there is nothing left for us there....still I can't help but feel we are running to the edge of a boundary....and I don't know what it looks like past that point....

.....just another day in the life of an unlikely military wife.....**