Half a World Closer

The mileage on a love is not the measure of it. People who live in the same apartment can be further apart than people who haven’t shared a city in years. We know this. We know it the way we know that water is wet. And yet, when the love we are in happens to be a long-distance one, we apologize for it. We tell people about it sideways. We frame it as something we are surviving instead of something we are doing on purpose.

This is one of the failures of how we talk about love. We have inherited the assumption that closeness is a geometric problem. It is not. Closeness is an attention problem. It is the question of whether the person you love is in the room you are thinking in, regardless of whether they are in the room you are sitting in. Most of the time, when people complain about feeling far from someone they live with, what they are noticing is that the other person’s attention has wandered off without taking the body with it.

Distance, real distance, the kind that costs a flight and a time zone, does something strange to attention. It forces the work to be visible. You cannot drift through the day and accidentally be with someone if they are on the other side of an ocean. You have to choose them. You have to send the message. You have to wake up at a time that doesn’t suit you so you can hear their voice in the small hours of theirs. The relationship cannot run on inertia, because there is no inertia. There is only choice.

This is hard, and it is also a gift. Couples who live together can go years without ever choosing each other on purpose. Long-distance couples do it every morning. They wake up, and the relationship is not assumed; the relationship is renewed. The renewal is exhausting and it is also the thing that keeps the love from going to sleep.

Some of the songs in this catalog are about this kind of presence. One of them is called We Met in Spirit, and the title is the whole argument. The meeting happens before the meeting. The recognition is the thing. The geography catches up later. Another one, Across the Distance, holds a phrase in Persian inside an English song and refuses to translate it. The point is not that you understand every word. The point is that the love does, and the love is what’s holding the line.

If you are in this kind of love, here is what I want you to hear. The distance is not a flaw. It is not a thing to apologize for. It is the medium in which your particular love is happening, and the love is real on that medium. It also costs more than the love that lives next door. That is not a complaint. It is just a fact, and the fact deserves to be acknowledged. You are doing a harder version of an ordinary thing, and you are doing it on purpose.

The resolution this kind of love reaches for is not the airport scene. The airport is just punctuation. The resolution is the moment, in the middle of the night, in your own kitchen, when you realize that the person you have been choosing is also in their own kitchen, choosing you. There is no audience for this moment. The two of you are the only ones who know it happened. That is the closeness. That is what distance was a test of, all along.