Between You and Me….
Sometimes I wonder if the heaviness we feel about distance is something we created ourselves. Long distance relationships, estranged family dynamics, and friendships that stretch a million miles apart… I mean, is distance a bad thing? This question lingers now more than ever as I enter my 20s.
For some background: I’ve known distance more than most. A quiet companion that’s been attached to my hip since I was twelve, no matter how hard I tried to shake it.
It was around the time I got my first period that my parents split. I chose to move to Texas with my dad, while my mom stayed behind in California. Since then, summers and school breaks became a delicate dance between both worlds. When I was here, I missed everything about there. When I was there, I missed everything about here. Mostly, I feared being forgotten, or worse— coming to the realization that everyone’s life could keep moving on without me.
At twenty, distance returned, this time with Lover Boy. Never was there a doubt in my mind that he bared the kind of soul that was far too expansive to be contained inside the three walls of our El Paso. So I watched as he disappeared behind the security gates at the airport, knowing he’d become one more person I would have to learn to love from afar.
And after all this time trying to control the feeling of having my heart scattered across different area codes and time zones, I’ve come to believe we might’ve placed far too much negativity on our friend distance, blaming most of our own faults and definitely everyone else’s on it. Blaming it on our breakups, our miscommunication, even our own resentment. But experiencing it for as long as I have, I’ve come to learn that the things that hurt the most, are just growing pains.
So as I enter this new chapter of adulthood, and I begin to imagine the kind of life I want to build, the person I want to become, I’ve started to believe that maybe distance, the thing we fear most in a world already so divided, has always been signage of our heart’s desire to tell us, “go.” Love yourself enough to leave, even when it means leaving the people you love behind.
I know this to be true because it’s the same reason my dad left his own family to become the man he dreamed of being. And why my mom didn’t go with us to Texas, so she could remember the woman she was outside of him. And why my grandparents left their families behind in Texas, to find something new in each other.
The funny thing about distance?
It always circles back to make us whole again.
I think of the Pangea. A once-whole world, now broken into several pieces. Different lands for all of us to walk through, first kisses taken beneath different skies, and a million lives buried beneath different grounds. And through it all, they say, the continents inch back closer towards each other. As if the earth, too, longs to be whole again.
That’s no coincidence.
Just like it’s no coincidence that my dad leaving his family eventually brought him back to the same desert my grandparents once left behind. And why we now call that place home. How true it seems, then, that our journeys away from home often lead us back to ourselves.
So, no— I don’t think distance is about separation.
Like continents
shifting over a
million
lifetimes,
when we leave, we also undergo transformation.
Does it break us open? Most definitely. But in those fractures, something else begins:
Space. Space to grow. Space to become.
So maybe leaving isn’t the abandonment of love at all, but the beginning of a deeper kind, the kind that dares to continue across time, across miles, and across borders.
The kind of love that knows it was never meant to stay still.
