gassed.

sunny skies again. i have a cup of hot chocolate next to me and a sweatshirt over my pajamas. i like early mornings. it's only 8:30am but i feel so wide awake. boy and i talked this morning 10:30pm his time, 6:30am london time. we've gotten a pretty good routine down by now, which i guess is pretty depressing when you think about it. no matter. in 20 short days i will be with him again. love is a funny thing sometimes. i am in fast paced, amazing london counting down the days till i go home. i will miss it here though...
yesterday i went to the imperial war museum with my british museums class. i've always been interested in military history, especially WWII. i don't like war, but i know that it is necessary for freedom. since dating caleb, who is in the national guard, my views on war have changed slightly. i think i am more supportive now. i also can't watch war movies anymore. i tired last semester. i got about 5 minutes into the filim saving private ryan(which i've seen) before my shoulders started to shake and tears began flowing. i turned it off. so yesterday i was prepared to feel emotional as we entered the museum. we looked at tanks, planes, v2 rockets and machine guns. we also went into the art gallery and stood in front of the painting below. it was entitled "gassed". the class sat in front of it, their pencils flying while our teacher gave us the history and inspiration behind the painting. i sat in the back of the room, my back against the wall, my knees pulled up to my chest, looking. the teacher soon moved onto what we would be doing next class and had a loud discussion with the my peers about exams and so on. i was upset. everyone was being loud and i was suddenly annoyed. i wanted to stand up and shout "not in here. take your mundane talk out of this room. show some respect!" but instead my eyes welled up with tears and i stopped listening to the chatter around me. i was lost in the painting, in the scene it depicted. i imagined caleb in that painting. i imagined our troops in the middle east fighting and dying so that i could be free. i was very quiet. last to leave the room, i looked at the painting one final time. it seemed so strange to have a painting so huge be so quiet. i don't know how to explain it... but it felt like the giant canvas with hundreds of wounded soldiers on it was so deafeningly silent, a silence that took up the whole empty gallery.
after class was over i went back to that room, stood beneath the giant work of art and cried.
-bekah