Where Are You?

He called yesterday, his voice very small, asking me why he’d left the house.  Sitting next to him on the seat of the truck was a couple of cases of sodas.  We hadn’t needed sodas.  I asked where he was.
“I’m at the grocery store, why am I here.  Where are you?”

I was home.  He’d gone out to get a game card for his X-Box, and he’d only been gone twenty or thirty minutes – which in hindsight is far too long since the grocery store is within walking distance. 
I told him to come home; “we’ll talk about it when you get here.”  Then I went out to the front garden and waited for the familiar sound of his truck.

While I stood there, and it was only a short time, a million things went through my mind…
How long had he been catatonic?  Because that’s how it works, he goes far away in his eyes and becomes unresponsive.

How much had he lost?  Because every time he loses memories, be it a few minutes or a few days.
What had he done that he couldn’t remember?  Because sometimes he believes he’s back in Iraq working on patients and patrolling in the city.

Is he going to be okay?  Because every time we do this, I worry the next time will be the time something breaks and he gets lost – lost physically, lost mentally, I don’t know.

I’ve toyed with getting him a new set of dog tags – I am an OIF veteran, I have PTSD, Please call my wife – but I don’t want him to be embarrassed.  I’ve asked him to put wife next to my name on his phone – it’s actually a good idea to identify your relatives in your phone anyway.  I don’t know if he has, but today I’ll ask.  He needs to be safe and we need to do whatever we can do to ensure this.
He’s still asleep as I write these words, exhausted from yesterday but with no memory of the entire day.  We do this a lot.  He’ll have an episode and I’ll have to fill him in on the events of the hours or days leading up to it because they’re gone.  He’s not missing out on life, he’s having little pieces of it fall away like they never happened.  Sometimes it’s not important stuff, but it’s still his and he’s losing it bit by bit.

Sometimes he remembers, but never fully and never in a coherent manner.  He’ll have little flashes of things that he’s lost, but mostly they don’t make much sense unless I’m right there to help him.
I worry every day that something is going to happen.  Something we can’t fix with a little rest and reclusiveness.  Today, though, we’ll hang around the house letting him recover, then quietly and in private I’ll attempt to recover myself.