It’s been 13 long months since I’ve seen my baby. And those 13 months have felt like 13 years. And it also feels like just yesterday when I saw her last. So for all these reasons you can see why I consider myself unbelievably lost. 

Like so young misled boys looking to serve their country, I fudged my age a bit to get admitted into soldier ranks. When you’re talking about the primal instincts of war— the type of instincts that’ll make you see a bird’s head and say “yum”—, what’s one extra months, really? Or two extra months? Or, in my case 167 extra months.

But for a 4 year old in war, life in the trenches is not all peaches and cream. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be crackers and then, if I’m lucky, more crackers. It’s long nights, even longer days, and like, so little playtime. 

You wake up at the crack of dawn, get out of your “The Amazing Spiderman” sleeping bag, tie up your Magic Johnson Special Edition Laker Converse Sneakers, and set off to do all the things that make us men: like cutting our portioned meat foods all by ourselves with no help at all from mom, and looking at gross stuff without crying. 

Throughout the whole time, I never forgot her face. Her sweet face reassembled itself everynight in my dream, and everynight skin became more like porcelain, and porcelain has become marble. I built and rebuilt her into a statue of herself more beautiful every day in the annals of my mind, which is saying alot considering my general grip on the concept of object permanence.

We’ve always had a complicated relationship. You’ve heard the story before, haven’t you? I say potayto, she says potat-ow, I say tomayto, she says tomat-ow, I am real, she is technically an imaginary friend who I developed deep romantical feelings for. Guess when you think about it we’re just as basic as any two lovebirds out of any little lovebird nest. I’m just like any other 4 year old sucker who Uncle Sam tricked into going to war. And she’s just like any other super cool and pretty imaginary girl who loves me and wears bright red lipstick and leaves big smooch marks on my neck and all the bullies at school would have crushes on her if they saw her but she only has eyes for me. But even so, we’ve always felt special, and tomorrow, we’ll feel special again, when we are finally reunited after mom picks me up from soccer practice and drops me off at her house to play.