The Internet

Don't ever try to explain to me how the internet works because as far as I'm concerned the internet is magic. There's no explaining the way it travels through the air, penetrates my computer and brings me live feed of my tired, sunburnt and sand covered husband.

When you have a deployed soldier you often times find your electronics will become your best friend.

The glow of your computer is in your face at all hours of the night, the notifications from online messengers mirroring that of a heartbeat monitor. Unlike your significant other, however, you cannot Google things through them or watch TV which, now that I think about it, would be insanely cool.

I imagine a time before technology where soldiers were kissed goodbye and fingers were crossed and I become thankful for being able to see my pixelated soldier almost every day.

So when the internet goes out, severing the connection between my husband and I, the whole world becomes vastly more dramatic. It literally gets darker in the room because I am forced to unplug my electronics in hopes that resetting everything will bring it back.

I begin remembering things that I have been meaning to Google like more fuzzy socks, more funny pictures of cats, websites of bad dogs being shamed, how to fix my internet when it goes out and more funny pictures of cats.

And as quickly as I have this moment of panic the blinky lights return and my entertainment is restored. The panic of all of the emergency Googles fades away and those things get put back on the shelf and most of all: I feel really, really stupid for putting so much meaning into the internet.

My brief stint in the darkness reminds me to always be thankful for the things we have: big and small. Not to think of these things, pretentiously, as "first world problems" but to stop and just simply be thankful. The magic of the internet, the fact that I can read (I read that in Afghanistan 93% of women are illiterate), the fact that you don't have to hope upon all hopes that tonight you will get to talk to your husband online, if only for a moment. Sometimes it takes the brief moment of drama, of darkness, however exaggerated I may have just presented it to knock us back down to Earth.

So don't ever try to explain the internet to me, it is magic, magic in more ways than one and you may just get a lecture on being more thankful. You never know.