TYPED

She shakes her head and looks at me.
"I still can't believe that. I just can't imagine it," she says.
We are standing outside on the wooden balcony patio of a club where we have come to see my first lover perform. I am talking to an old friend, someone I knew in my teenage years and probably haven't seen in over fifteen years.
"I just would never imagine that you would have married a soldier. That doesn't seem like your type at all."
"Why?" I ask her all the while thinking, I had a "type"? I ask for elaboration. "Because I was all 'peace, love, and -fff'-?" I make a sound of an inhale while holding my fingers up to my mouth, as if I was smoking a joint.
"Yeah, because of the peace, love, and fff..." she says, also bringing her hand up to her mouth as if she is smoking some herb, and laughing at me. Suddenly the years catch up with me, and I remember the girl she must be remembering, the one in long boot cut jeans and funky necklaces, hanging out with the long haired boys with a roach clip in my pocket, a Kerouac book in my hand, and The Beatles playing on a cassette tape in the car.
The funny thing is I don't feel like I have changed at all. I myself have been caught up in the dilemma of being married to someone who supports something I completely oppose. I would nonviolently protest his deployments but no one seemed to notice. I would stick a flower in the muzzle of his gun, if he was allowed to bring it home.
I don't support the war, but the war supports me, I used to quip while anxiously awaiting his letters home. Or, I don't support the war, but I support my soldier, while filling care packages to go overseas to an APO for sorting before being delivered to a base in the desert.
I never meant to marry into the military, and I tell her a story about how my college boyfriend was headed to the military until we got serious, and I told him how adamant I was that I would not be a military wife. He decided to go in another direction instead, and eventually I ended up breaking his heart anyway, to marry this man, this man who was NOT going to be a soldier but still had a contract for a few years with the National Guard. Then poof, 9/11 happened, and that which never happened before started happening - they started sending the National Guard, our "weekend warriors", overseas to fight the war on terrorism. Suddenly three of the ten years we have been married has been spent apart while he fights, something I don't believe in, for our "freedom".
At any rate, I am wondering what "type" of person she would have imagined me with. Would he have long hair and some kind of eclectic profession, some sensitive pony-tailed guitar player? I run through my top five loves in my head again, trying to determine if I had a "type".
Meanwhile we are there to watch one of those five perform with his band onstage. I was struck by something while watching him that I never noticed before, in all these years of rememberance of years past. There was something remiscent in his jaw structure, in his mannerism, his profile...Oh. I never noticed before how very much he looks like my college boyfriend. He makes a face a couple times on stage that was exactly like one R used to make to me sometimes. And I realize that maybe, just maybe, I had some kind of type there, some physical characteristics I was looking for without even realizing it.
Maybe it is a little unfair to lump them together. After all, their life circumstances and professional interests are completely different...
But for a moment there, watching him center stage, I think...maybe I did have a type after all.