Six Hundred Kilometres of Nothing
You find someone who gets into you at a cellular level—the specific way they smell, the particular stupidity of their laugh, how they look at you when you’re talking about something you love—and then the catch reveals itself: they live six hundred kilometres away. The universe has a consistent sense of humor.
Long-distance is waiting with extra steps. Waiting for money to accumulate for the next plane ticket. Waiting for the weekend when neither of you is completely wrecked by work or already committed somewhere else. Waiting for the video call that never quite captures anything real—the connection drops, the image freezes mid-expression, and you’re left staring at a pixelated face that’s supposed to substitute for an actual person. Skype as a stand-in for fucking. It’s a bad trade and everyone making it knows it.
The physical absence is the obvious wound. No spontaneous anything. No rolling into each other on a Tuesday night because you’re both home and you can. No waking up to that particular smell. What you get instead is a relationship that exists almost entirely in text and scheduled calls—a love life running on good intentions and flight timetables, which is a romantic way of describing something that grinds you down slowly.
What surfaces at 2am, three weeks after you last saw each other, is the doubt. The question you’ve been avoiding: does this still make sense? Both of you are living full lives in different cities, both subject to the ordinary pull of proximity—interesting people, alcohol, loneliness, boredom—and all that stands between you and any of that is trust, which is a lovely word for something you can’t actually verify. Long-distance demands extraordinary faith in someone you can’t watch.
The ones that survive do so through stubbornness more than romance. Vivid enough memories to hold onto. Enough reliability that you believe the other person when they say where they are. And eventually an actual plan—with a timeline—to stop living this way. The ones that don’t end the usual way: someone meets someone closer, or the waiting grows heavier than the loving, and the whole thing collapses into grief and a pile of expensive tickets you wish you’d spent on something else.
I’ve seen it go both ways.