I figured that I was frustrated by our circumstances today - she on the edge of one continent and I on the brink of another, all the while looking at each other across the ocean and wishing that we can pull ourselves together.
The feeling that we're in this rut, that we've dug ourselves into this most imperfect of situations makes me want to find a way to fix it, to grab all the mental tools I know to patch together pieces that are broken of their own accord. She goes about her day while I'm sleeping, and when I wake up she's pulling on the blanket. It's winter there when it's summer here – and I'm afraid that being physically on opposite ends of the world will slowly slide us into opposite corners of our relationship, too.
My best moments with her are when we're moving and on the go. Our first date had us cris-crossing Philadelphia more than eleven years ago. We found then different ways to look at each other, to work ourselves around disagreements and grab ideas that were worth exploring, sparring and coming together, looking at our words and gestures with the same kind of perception as the world around us. On that first date, we walked through City Hall and across Chinatown before wrapping around to Old City and back up through Restaurant Row and Rittenhouse Park before crossing the bridge back our college's campus. We took photos of public statues and waded through fountains; we peeked at window dressings and pressed our faces against bookstores; we looked up at skyscrapers, padded through cobblestone streets, rested under trees and kept on walking - walk walking towards a destination that we already realized was unimportant, because it meant the end of our time together.
As the morning seeped into afternoon and rolled into an incandescent night, we stepped through visible and invisible borders, and there's a thrill of crossing borders that always resonates with me.
There was a sense of other-worldliness, a heightened realness. Those moments we shared were some of the truest memories I would gain. We talked about nothing of importance, using words and language as an exercise to stretch ourselves towards each other, with each step getting closer to our hidden selves. Sometimes we retreated into the observations of the world around us, and sometimes when we've had our fill of the outside world, we'd retraced our invisible steps, finding breadcrumbs to each others' thoughts. Our relationship was built on movement, on the pure joy of walking with each other and knowing that it was the journey and not the destination that thrilled us.
It's why talking on the phone or over video never really feels real. We're locked down, forcing ourselves to appoint a time and place to converse, when really, the best parts of us are fluid and growing and moving and changing all the time. I've never been able to hold onto her; like dappled sunlight of the warm summers in my memories, I can only feel the warmth or admire the shadow and light reflecting off the brook or bouncing between the leaves or draped over the fields – it's the momentum that's most real to me, that makes me want to hang on more and run to catch up with her.
We walked a lot more after that Philadelphia day: through the villages of New York and Asia and Africa and Europe and all across the world. Along the way, our little hopscotch game, of moving in and out of the real and make believe world, seeing the cities surrounding us and building invisible cities inside us, and jumping back and forth between metaphors and observations, challenges and reconciliations, memories and prognostications -- our interactions grew us closer together, more attuned to each other.
And so now, it feels strange to stay in one place and be so far away. Instead of walking together, we've situated ourselves apart. Instead of growing closer to each other, we're attempting to build self-preserving lives around other people. We go out and meet people and do things to pass time, orbiting a lonely pull of just us, expanding and collapsing like a star without planets.
I'm ready to move again, to rebuild parts of our crumbling cities, to walk again and see the world in new ways again, to converse and argue and make up and grow up up up (but hopefully not all that much older).