Hundreds of Miles

You finally find someone who gets under your skin, who makes you feel alive and horny and like maybe something’s actually happening. And then they live hundreds of kilometers away. Long-distance is a special kind of hell—all compromise and denial and the constant ache of missing someone. There’s no falling into each other at the end of the day. No sex on your friend’s kitchen floor or tangled up on a couch. Just the rare video call, their face pixelated, their voice cutting out. No smell. No touch. Just screens.

Skype and Messenger and phone calls become the stand-in for everything you’d be doing if you weren’t on opposite ends of the map. What are you doing right now? Where are you? Is the connection working? God, I want you. That’s all you have—words and the thought of them, which is its own kind of torture.

Your life becomes one long holding pattern. Saving money for plane tickets you’re never quite sure are worth it. Waiting for a weekend when you’re both free at the same time, when work and family and obligation aren’t eating every hour. Waiting for the moment it all gets solved, waiting for one of you to finally move or break it off. But you know how it ends. It ends in grief. It ends in anger. It ends in regret.

And the thing is, it requires everything. Trust, reliability, the ability to keep the good memories alive between visits. But it breaks anyway. Because someone at work smiles at you the right way, or you meet someone new, and suddenly the person who’s far away doesn’t feel as real. The temptation next to you wins over the person miles away. It always does.

So I’m left with the question that always comes back: does any of it matter? All the sacrifice, the absence, the waiting—is there actually a point if it’s going to fall apart the moment someone else is close enough to touch?