When something you’ve been anticipating for a long, long time starts being set into motion, it feels like a weird inertia. You see it coming, you’ve been preparing for it and braced yourself for it and yet once it’s here—it still feels like the car you didn’t see coming. Before you can slam on the brakes and get a hold of yourself, the impact of it nearly takes your breath away. I think that’s what happened in the midst of my last post.
I admit that’s a dramatic reaction to watching my partner packing up his DVDs on Friday afternoon, but it stirred inside me the fragile version of myself who’s watched so many people that I love leave town for one reason or another. In an instant, I was that lonely little kid who didn’t want to see her big sister leave, then the rebellious teenager who thought she was ready to be on her own and yet felt totally devastated when her family moved halfway around the world, and finally, the twenty-something who watched as her closest friends moved to the East coast one by one, leaving her social life a vast wasteland of acquaintances and co-workers.
My whole life I’ve felt like I’m always the one being left behind and now I’m on the brink of thirty and this time, I’m the lover being left behind–if only for awhile. I can tell you one thing, you never get used to it. No matter how much practice I have with saying goodbye, it never rolls off the tongue when it’s someone I love. It lessens the blow to know when I’ll see them again, but for the most part it sucks a little more every time.
I like to think of myself as independent, but every time this happens, it’s a glaring reminder that the people in my life are the most important thing to me. A phone call after a bad day helps but it can’t compare to crying on the shoulder of an old friend who doesn’t care if you get tears and snot on her shirt while you stutter through the tale of what caused it all. Emailing a lusty note to tell your partner that you’re thinking about them after a night of hot sex is good too, but is nothing next to seeing the outline of their face against a pillow in the wee hours of morning when you know they won’t wake up for hours. In the grand scheme of things, these tiny intimacies are the things we take for granted in our day to day monotony and yet they’re among the few things that really and truly matter.
Sometimes I think in this brave new digital age that we tend dismiss the distance as if it doesn’t really matter anymore because we have so many ways to keep in touch. See something crazy on the street? Text your pals. Boss driving you bonkers? Email your friend. Read a funny article? Post it to Facebook and share it with everyone you know. There are so many ways to keep in touch, but I don’t think it brings us closer; it just gives us the illusion of being closer.
I go visit my friends in New York and in the other 360 days of the year that I don’t get to see them, there are scores of nights out together, inside jokes and ridiculous occurrences that they have together and I know I’m missing out on them. It’s not like they rub it in my face; they usually explain it, but it doesn’t make me feel any less out of the loop. It makes me feel like I’ve lost my relevance in their lives purely out of lack of proximity. And it’s not just them. I had the same experience when my family moved to England. Suddenly my mom and brother who barely spoke to each other stateside would crack up over some random thing and whatever caused the laughter went totally over my head because well, “you had to be there”.
In spite of what anyone says, I have to question if all the messages we transmit in an instant using 1’s and 0’s can possibly measure up to the impact of a single hug or a smile or any other old school method of getting your point across. I think geography matters when it comes to personal relationships. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t bother getting on planes for Christmas.
The question I keep asking myself is “where is the lesson in all this?” because I believe that if something keeps happening over and over again, it must be because we’re supposed to learn something from it.
Here I am, 21 years after the first time someone close to me hit the bricks and I’m no closer to grasping the lesson than I was back then. And it feels like the stakes increase with each person who moves to another zip code.
This time, it’s my partner. What if I lose my relevance in his life because of geography? It’s easily the darkest of my fears, but there it is in black and white. I’m afraid I won’t matter as much to him anymore because I’m far away and he’ll be busy starting a new life without me. I know it’s ridiculous and I know I’ll adjust, but for right now I could really stand not to have anyone else disappear from my life or anything else disappear from our shelves into boxes knowing that void will be there for awhile. I hate voids. I hate feeling like I’m missing out on stuff. And I really hate the phrase, “I guess you had to be there…”
Maybe the lesson is that I need to just get over it.
