I’ve been writing this post for what feels like a week (but is really only an hour or so) and it’s still a sappy piece of shit, so fuck it, I’m starting over.
I’ve been thinking about distance (in the geographic sense) and closeness (in the intangible/emotional sense) and how different my feelings about these things are now as opposed to a few years ago. A friend of mine left this morning (well, was planning to leave in any case – after yestereve’s beer-fueled impromptu backgammon tournament he might still be around) for New York, and walking the last block back to my place after we said our goodbyes last night I realized that when I said, “I’ll see you,” that was exactly what I meant. No big gravity or air of finality, just a “see ya later” kind of a thing. It was not always so. I used to think somehow that when a person moved halfway across the country (or, heaven forfend, even further away), this great gulf would open between us and the friendship would wither and die for lack of contact. I suppose there are people with whom I’ve actually lost touch after they moved to one of the coasts, and I’m not just talking about the ones who went to LA and then insane, in quick succession. Self-fulfilling prophecy, I suppose: thinking distance was an obstacle made it so. It’s extra-odd that I would think this way, seeing’s how more than half of my family’s friends at any given point in my formative years were several thousand miles away.
Maybe it was my recent bout of prolonged wandering that jogged something loose, or into place. Before I left, alongside the freaking out about going alone to a place where I couldn’t even read, let alone speak the language, whether or not I could live without 50 pairs of shoes and other attendant worries, I thought about the possibility that I’d be forgotten when I came back. There is an appeal to the nomadic lifestyle that’s borne out in the fact that you can be a stranger when you want to. I have more or less a love/hate relationship with that concept, and while I love going away and being totally anonymous, I also love coming home and being welcomed into the arms of my friends. And of course I didn’t come back a stranger. One never really does, particularly when returning to such an established place. In the end, distance is really a very minor thing, and time in retrospect always seems shorter. I still find it difficult to believe that I was gone for the better part of a year, and yet when I came back it was as though I’d never left. Except that I totally missed the winter.
Which brings me to a point of sorts – at least, probably the closest thing you’ll find to a point in this rambling mess: Dictionary.com defines distance as “the extent of space between two objects or places; an intervening space.” I posit that the space between two people who are in the same room, inches apart, can be greater than the span of any ocean I’ve crossed. Friendship, love, the connections between people – none of these things are about geography. There are people I know that live right around the corner from me and I haven’t seen them in years. By contrast, there are people I know on the other side of the Atlantic that I talk to almost every day. Who’s at a greater distance?
So do me this favor: if you’re a friend of mine, and you decide to move to another city or go be a hermit in the mountains for a few years or try out the Amish lifestyle [brief aside: the Amish have a web site?!?] and see if it suits you or meditate at Plum Village or something, unless you really intend to shoot me if I get within 100 feet of the porch, don’t give me the grand old “be well,” ok? It’s got a finality to it that just doesn’t fit our bill.