Five Days After Our Wedding I Flew Home Alone

Filling the void as best we can, and waiting.

Baking banana muffins for myself on a Sunday morning struck a feeling, some emotion that had been haunting me over the last two and half months since I got married. Between being separated by 2,063 miles from my husband and learning my role at a new job in a foreign region of the US, it was hard to pinpoint what this feeling was.

This lingering sentiment could not be from a flaw in our wedding day. Our wedding was as perfect as a wedding could be for us. We had all the snow we wanted, even a snowball fight. We survived the ceremony without the priest chastising us. Our reception venue was perfect except for the finicky oven delaying the entrees an hour (which no one cared because they were amazing). The only person who ended up stranded from canceled flights was me, which gave me two more days with my new husband, and my new amazing boss didn’t make me use my vacation time. And the feeling of joy from having all our families together for a happy event for the first time in fifteen years still resonates today.

But something was missing the day after our wedding and has become ever more present over the passing weeks. This morning cooking muffins for myself in my one bedroom apartment within an apartment complex, I realized this feeling is derived from my husband and me not having a home. We have separate residences where we eat, sleep, and try to relax.

I always figured when I got married, we would return from a mind-blowing honeymoon to our home. Being married meant I was allowed settle down and create a dwelling that resonated what my husband and I wanted out of life. We would make a home filled with memories of our successes and failures, where we would comfort and love each other.

Instead, five days after our wedding I flew from northern Michigan to central Idaho to start my fourth week of work. My apartment was the same as I had left it before Christmas, cold, vacant, and looking more like a bachelor lived there out of boxes. My husband is still staying out of his house as much as possible because he is trying to avoid seeing the place that was meant to be a home for us, before the job.

We are both taking up tasks to fill the void. I adopted a dog, started working on my golf game again, and have been on putting my art minor to use. He took on a second job to fill his evenings, and in a few months he will be working eighteen-hour days on the golf course; his house will be there just for sleeping. But we both know until we live together neither of us will have a home.

Currently I do not know if my new job is what I want for my career and won’t at least till next year. My husband has his dream job, in our dream location, just no job security. To bide the time we have many conversations of what we want for our future home and what comprises a home for us.

For our monthly anniversary I describe to him in a letter my dreams of our future home. This month included, “There will be trees, upon which mark the change in the seasons and near these trees we will have a place to garden. Which our dogs and future children will run through the paths the corn rows create as the tomatoes try to napoleonize the majority of the garden. I hope there are berry bushes near our home, so I can make you pies in our kitchen and bake eccentric berry flavored cakes for our unborn children’s birthdays.”

Until that moment is here, I fight the urge to move back to him and him to move to me, to what we want to create as home.

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