Three thousand miles from home, I've fallen for someone six hundred miles from here--about four hundred further than my first love, who was in Portland when I was in Seattle. We would drive about ninety miles when we wanted to meet halfway, almost two hundred when we wanted to visit for the weekend. The distance never bothered me. I always said I'd drive twelve hours just to see her for thirty minutes.
Distance has never been insurmountable. Three thousand miles is a few days of driving or a few hours on a plane, then a bus or a rented car from SeaTac and dinner in familiar places, visiting old friends. Then it's ten minutes almost anywhere, thirty by bus. They'll be snowbound right now. It never really was when I was home, except for once just before dawn, when the sky was blue, and the streetlights were yellow and it was beautiful and ethereal and foreign and I never captured it in words, though I tried many times.
From six hundred miles away, I can only see snapshots, but in them everything is perfect. From here, I have no influence. I keep up the same way I do with my home: with blogs, conversations. I'm not there anymore, and when I am, I'm a guest. Ultimately I'm expected to leave. It's ephemeral.
So she is outside of my five mile sphere of influence--she will always be six hundred miles away, her life lived through snapshots of perfection, something I will never be able to sully or experience.
20081226
so far from home
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5 comments:
I just want to know, without really knowing you and with no agenda whatsoever: are you happy? Truly happy??
"Call no man happy until he is dead."
But yeah I am mostly a happy person with an attraction-introspection-diction predilection. So I write morose things, because as someone once observed, happiness writes white. (And I apparently can only write in maxims, quotes, and song references.)
Thank you for asking though! I am doing all right and do not want anyone to worry.
It's a selfish worry, really. You remind me of myself in many ways, so I want to know how my life might be... I am living my future vicariously through your writing, if you will.
If your life is like mine it will be variously confusing, amazing, terrible, and all of these at the same time. There will be misunderstandings and people who will always understand you and your plans will probably be shaken up completely once or twice, you'll end up in a city you never dreamed you'd be in and living a life you never expected possible. And there will always be stories to tell, which makes every single minute worthwhile.
That's what I like to hear. I suppose I did have an agenda after all. :]
By the way, I just finished reading today-- everything you've written. I don't want to seem.. I dunno, creepy or anything by being so thoroughly absorbed by you, and so suddenly at that. I just love your writing. Really and truly.
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