22 Minutes 10 seconds

I should start by telling you that my phone talks.  It tells you the name of who is calling before it actually rings.  It usually does this 2 or 3 times and then starts to ring.  On my drive home today my phone started shouting at me like it does anytime I get a call, only this wasn't any call, my phone was shouting "A Perfect Husband" (yeah, yeah laugh...we do this so that we are each listed as the first person in the phone in case of random pocket dialing...or when Gunnar used to get a hold of the phones and call the 1st number in them all the time).  I was more than a little startled as he is still in Red Phase aka non contact, and it is a Wednesday, so even if Red Phase had ended without me knowing, phone time is usually reserved for Sundays only.

With my heart beating and my hands shaking I grabbed for my phone as quickly as I could, fearing, completely irrationally, that I would somehow miss this single call.  Out of breath for no reason other than pure delight I said hi and hello more times than I can count.  I really does take a moment to register that I am actually hearing his voice.  Then suddenly when I do, I'm all butterflies and stuttering like a love sick school girl.  My brain and my mouth don't seem to connect, and I have all these things I want to say, and I want to tell him everything all at once and it's like a jumble of nonsense.

I realize this after I've jabbered a bunch of gibberish for the first 5 minutes or so when I finally take a deep breath and say what I've been trying to say all along...I love you, I miss you, I'm going to see you soon!  It's at this point that we finally settle into a more manageable conversation, and he tells me about what he's doing and I tell him that everything here is fine and we just can't wait to get him home.  We spend a few of our precious moments talking about "business" what I need him to bring home, and what I need him to get done before he gets here.  He asks me to send him a few essentials, and I tell him I will gladly get them out to him as soon as possible.  We talk briefly of miniature ACU's for Gunnar, and what size to bring home from the PX and we exchange more I love you's and I miss you's and before I know it my 22 minutes and 10 seconds of bliss has come to a close.

I had no idea that after nearly 9 years together and almost 7 years married that I would have butterflies just hearing the sound of my husbands voice.  I never knew that there would ever come a time when I would search for picture of him on Facebook just to see if he has changed since I last saw his handsome face.  I

certainly never in my wildest dreams expected to be sitting here, writing about how close this distance has brought us.