Kiss And Tell

I did a lot of kissing yesterday….but I won’t kiss and tell.

Ha! What a joke! I love to kiss and tell. I live to kiss and tell. I’m sure that I regularly tell more than people care to hear. I have a reputation for telling it as it is, no holding back. I’m neither too afraid nor too embarrassed to cross the line. It’s my raw honesty that keeps my readers coming back for more. Some of my all-time most popular posts have been the ones that were provocative in some way: when I discussed my struggle with weight, when I recounted my painful encounter with death, when I confessed to my secret love, when I divulged sex-life secrets. This willingness to “tell all” has earned me more than a few devoted followers.

But now I have a problem. My loving fans are waiting on the edge of their seats to read all about that ever-elusive, highly-coveted, famous thing called ‘homecoming’, which has stolen months and months worth of blog post attention. That day has finally come and gone and people are dying to hear the stories. The trouble is I have nothing to write.

I thought about writing about the dress I bought for $9 and then hand-altered, or about the insanely hectic morning at the house when I was bustling around like crazy trying to make myself, the kids, and the house look perfect, or about the lead car in our five vehicle caravan that blew a tire on the way to the base, or about how grumpy we all were sitting on the pier for hours getting sun burnt and heatstroke while waiting for the ship to call liberty. But as entertaining as all these stories are, not one of them seems to do justice to the experience of homecoming. Should I call it "emotional," or "heart-wrenching?" Should I say that it was "amazing," or "wonderful," or "joyous?" No, those aren't the right words. Homecoming is all of that and more.

For once in my life, my words have run dry. No amount of poetic prose or literary wit or syntactic genius would be enough. I’m sorry, there is just no way for me to make you understand what the day was like. It required all of my academic knowledge and writing skills to give you this one (rather long, and complex (I recommend reading it slowly)) sentence:

You can never understand how it feels to stand and watch one of the world’s largest and most powerful vessels sailing towards you, carrying the person for whom you have longed- with every beat of your heart- and about whom you have cried- so much that your tears ran dry- and to whom you have written- more times than you wish to count- and about whom you have spoken- with both anguish and endearment- for seven long months, and then to wait for hours in the scorching sun with three impatient children, who are running around your feet and pulling at your ankles and clasping your neck, while trying to convince them that, “if we wait for just a little bit longer Daddy really will be coming home,” but all-the-while envisioning every trial that you recently faced alone and, therefore, wishing someone would convince you that the end actually is in sight and that you’re not stuck in some sort of cruel dream, and then to finally see that person- your partner, your best friend, your lover, your ‘other half’- coming toward you, looking better than he did in your wildest dreams, holding out his arms towards his sons and daughter to scoop them up into his warm embrace and reassure them of his ever-present love, and to throw your arms over his shoulders and bury your head in the crook of his neck and hear him whisper, quietly but with more meaning than ever before, “I love you,” unless you have done it.

You can never understand, unless you have done it. And most of you will never do it, so there is no way for me to help you understand.

This is one of those cases when each picture is worth a thousand words.

I know that a lot of you out there were hoping for more, anticipating some funny antidotes or juicy stories maybe. I’m sorry. I’m afraid that I will have to leave it at this. We did a lot of kissing yesterday, but like I said at the beginning, I won’t kiss and tell. There are just not enough words to do it justice.