It’s been a year since Paul came home from Afghanistan.

Last year, on the week before Christmas, Kelly & I were busy making preparations to pick Paul & Mark up from the airport together. We bought new clothes; we made hotel and restaurant reservations for the homecoming weekend; we counted the hours, minutes and seconds until we could be with our husbands again. I still remember the swell of anxiety, relief, joy, apprehension, suspense, and excitement knotting my stomach as we met in Kelly’s hotel room for a glass of Pinot Gris and a last-minute hair and makeup touch-up. Then, it was off to the airport.

Mark stepped off the plane first and I cheered Kelly on, snapping pictures as she and Mark embraced. Then, finally…. FINALLY…. after a year of waiting, Paul appeared and I screamed involuntarily and launched myself on him. Both of us lauging and crying – exhausted, overwhelmed and happy. The deployment was over.

Christmas was strange last year. Paul had only been home a week. He was quiet and moody. I was independant and used to doing things by myself. I wanted to show him how much I had missed him, but he always seemed to inhabit a place I couldn’t reach – a land where anything that wasn’t Army wasn’t important. We attended family gatherings were I silently prayed that no one would ask him any questions that would bring up sadness or anger. We had a welcome home party at our house that turned into a private showing of Afghanistan videos, complete with gunfire and bloody bodies – scenes that were all too commonplace to him now. He happily narrated as our friends looked on in discomfort. It was as if it were our first Christmas together, instead of our 4th. In so many ways, he was a stranger to me. Next year, I told myself, next year it will be normal again.

But instead of this Christmas being the year that everything became happy and peaceful again, it’s our first Christmas as a divorced couple. In a way, it feels like the deployment never ended for me. I still live in our farmhouse alone. I still panic when the pipes freeze or the power goes out – and I still feel helpless, unable to call the one person who said he would face this adventure with me. Now Paul lives just 30 miles away instead of on the other side of the world. And yet, I feel less able to reach him than I ever have.

The first few months after we split up, I had this fantasy: that one day he would heal and put the deployment behind him, and he would call me. We would meet for coffee and he would apologize for all the ways he hurt me when he walked out. Was it a dream where we would get back together? No. I don’t want that anymore. All I want now is for him to recognize that I waited for him. That I was here – lonely, isolated, holding down the homefront for his return. And that when he returned a different man, it still wasn’t me that left.

But in order for him to realize how much he hurt me, he would have to acknowledge how much he has changed. He would have to remember who he was when I met him, and I don’t think he can do it. These days Paul and I don’t talk, but I hear from people who know us both that he believes he is a happier, more complete man than he was before Afghanistan. He no longer believes in marriage or other social confinements. He believes he is free now. And that makes sense to me: if he doesn’t acknowledge the good in everything we had, he doesn’t have to mind to losing it.

Still, I wonder if he ever thinks about the life he left behind. I wonder if he misses me, or the dogs, or the farm we built together. And I wonder if he will ever again be the gentle, sensitive, silly, earnest man he once was. I want that for him – even if I no longer know him. It doesn’t seem fair that one year at war should take away everything he was. He’s already sacrificed enough.

I have a friend that I met during the deployment – she never knew Paul. At her request, I showed her a picture of us taken a couple of years ago at a Change of Command ceremony for his National Guard Company. Paul has his arm around me, pulling me off balance because he’s so much bigger than I am. He looks handsome and happy – round face, crooked grin, BDUs.

“Wow – he looks like such a great guy,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, smiling. “He really, really was.”

Then I showed her the last picture of us, taken at a military ball 2 days before he left me. He’s rigid in his dress blues, standing beside me but not touching. He’s smiling, but his face is serious and hard; his eyes are dull.

“That’s the same guy?” she asked, eyes wide.

“No,” I said, “It’s not.”