From further away than I would like
Still Here
Made on a Tuesday night in the wrong time zone, for someone who is probably asleep by now.
Right now
6,400 kilometres of it
We are living the same day at different hours. You are finishing yours while I am starting mine, and somewhere in the middle there is a window of two hours where we are both awake and both too tired to say anything interesting.
I have started thinking of that window as the actual day. Everything else is just waiting.
Until I see you
and counting down
That is all that is left of it.
The bit I do not say on calls
This is hard, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
On calls we both perform being fine, because the alternative is spending the twenty minutes we get being sad at each other. So we ask about the day, and we say goodnight, and we hang up having said almost nothing.
Here is the unperformed version. I miss you in the ordinary hours, not the dramatic ones. Tuesday afternoons, mostly, when there is nothing to report and nobody to not-report it to.
But I am not counting this as lost time. We are doing the boring part first.
Coordinates that mean something
- Terminal 2
The bench outside departures
You cried and blamed the wind. It was thirty-one degrees and completely still.
- Sundays
The bakery on the corner
I still order for two out of habit and then eat both. This is not a cry for help.
- Every night
Your side of the bed
Technically in another country. Still yours. I have not moved anything.
- That summer
The road we walked at 2am
We had nowhere to be and took three hours to get there.
Back when we were in the same room
Play this when the call drops
A voice note
Recorded badly and not re-recorded, which I think is the point.
For the nights it gets heavy
It was the connection, not the conversation. Whatever you were about to say, I still want to hear it. Text it to me badly.
I am awake in a different way, in a different place. That is not the same as being alone. Put this on and close your eyes.
They are asking because they could not. That is a fact about them, not a prediction about us.
Then stop explaining it. It does not require a defence. It requires a date in a calendar, and we have one.
Send it anyway. Out of context, badly framed, at the wrong hour. That is the whole relationship and I love it.
While we are apart
Things I will keep doing from here.
- 01To answer, even when I am busy, and especially when it is late here.
- 02To tell you the boring parts of the day, because those are the ones you are missing.
- 03Not to make the distance your problem to manage.
- 04To book the next visit before the current one is over.
- 05To say the thing on the call instead of saving it for a page like this.
It is never the big things.
People assume you miss the holidays and the occasions. You do not. You miss someone making a noise in the next room. You miss handing them half of something without asking. You miss the specific way they say your name when they have not got anything to follow it with.
Those are the things that do not survive a phone call.
The long way home
Walk it with me. There is something waiting at each stop, and you cannot get home until you have found all of them.
- The gate
- —
- —
- —
- —
Distance is what it costs.
Patience is what I am promising.
You are the reason
I think it is worth it.
Raise something
Here’s to closing this.
- To two cities, temporarily.
- To every visit that ended at an airport.
- To the boring part, dealt with first.
- And to the day this whole page stops being relevant.
One more thing
I booked it.
You know how we kept saying we would look at dates properly once things calmed down?
Things did not calm down. I booked it anyway.
What I do not say on the phone
I keep a running list of things to tell you and by the time we speak it has gone stale, so you get the highlights and none of the texture. That is what I resent most about this — not the missing, the compression.
So here is some texture. I am proud of how you have handled this. You have not once made me feel guilty for the geography, and you would have been entitled to.
I am coming back. That is not a sentiment, it is a plan with dates.
— yours, from the wrong hour
Until kilometres turn into footsteps,
until calls turn into conversations in one room,
until goodnight stops being a message
and becomes something I say to you
with the light off.
Not for much longer.
One day this is a chapter we talk about, and you are sitting next to me while we do.
made from too far away