I am sitting here in the quiet of my living room with a cat on my lap, waiting for Italian food to get to me, and I’m thinking, I wish you were here.
It’s a bittersweet feeling, missing people. The bitter is obvious, the lack of a presence you crave, the empty space next to you, the undisturbed air, your empty hand. The sweet is more elusive, but I’ve come to find it beautiful in its way. There’s something lovely in the knowledge that you value someone so much that you want them to be near you, so much that you feel a tangible difference when they’re not. It’s so nice to know people who have burrowed their way so deeply into your heart that they live there even when their bodies are far away. It’s so nice to sit and sigh and think of a day in the future when a person not currently here will be here again. How that will feel, the texture of the happiness it will bring.
I think it’s a little bit luxurious to press on that ache, gently, just enough to remember it’s there. To wallow in the sadness that isn’t unbearable, just sad enough to remind you that you’re alive. To remind you that you still feel and that those feelings live close enough to the surface to prick you just a little, just sometimes, just in the moments of rest when your mind wanders to what would soothe.
I grew up on the internet, is the thing. I built the home of myself from digital communications across miles and oceans and wires and signals. I peopled that home with friends I learned to love without ever having felt their physical presence. I’m accustomed to missing, to imagining a time when it would be different, when I could hug my friends and lean against them and share counter space and couch space and intermingle my things with theirs for a week or however long a visit lasted. I know how to navigate this. But I used to resent it. I felt the injustice of it, how unfair that I was denied the company of people who understood me, whose wavelengths matched mine. What cruel god dreamed up a world where I lived in one state and almost everyone I loved lived in others, or other countries across whole oceans, even?
Now I view it differently. I’ve learned to find peace in it, and, even if there are days when I feel like screaming because I just want to exist alongside someone who makes me feel safe and known and held, I go on drawing in breath and with each inhale, I color in the outline of a world where my people are mingling in shared space and I’m in the middle of it all, and with each exhale, I send out into the universe the certainty that one day this world and that one will meet. One day my friend who loves cooking and feeding the masses will occupy my kitchen, and as the smell of what she makes to nourish us fills up the house, my friend who is gifted with music will serenade us, and my friend who loves to write realities into being will tell us stories, and I will sit and hold the hand of my friend/more than friend/kindred spirit who defies explanation while another friend who has a magic touch with fashion and aesthetics will braid my hair. One day we will all touch and be touched and we will all love and be loved, and the miles will cease to exist and there will be no more need to let a few tears fall because someone I love is too far for me to put my arms around them.
But for this moment, the Italian food has come and I have eaten and put away leftovers, and I’m telling myself a story where you sat at my kitchen table with me and we used two forks for one dish, passed the bread back and forth, talked over each other in our excitement to share our lives and laughed at each other’s jokes and maybe, just occasionally, just lightly, my arm brushed yours, our knees bumped. Maybe, gently, we relearned how it feels to be near enough to bounce off of each other and come back together. And maybe, quietly but firmly, in a moment between bites, I said “I love you” and you smiled and said it back.
maybe that’s all we need. Maybe that’s all anyone needs. Maybe one day that story will leap off the page and burst into life. Maybe if I begin, “Once upon a time, there lived a girl who loved so hard, so big, that it altered space and time,” maybe the rest will unwind before me, a road I can walk with my two real feet and at the end of it, a door I can open with my two real hands and someone on the other side waiting to say hello, where have you been, it’s about time.