Baby, I'll bring Texas to you

I would argue that many of my most significant relationships to date have been long distance. I would freely admit that. Indulge in it, even.

From the very beginning…

The first boy I was ever certain I loved eventually taught me what it was like to be far away from that somebody, and how hard it would be to keep together. I was still in high school then, and he was offered a scholarship to play piano at a university 45 minutes away. Forty-five minutes! That’s hardly anything in retrospect. But when you are fifteen years old, without a car or drivers license, a whole year shy of when your mother was fixed on ‘allowing you to date’, that short trip seems like a million miles away. And pretty soon the trip is made less and less, and that boy you fell in love with that summer, under those constellations & turning streetlights, green-yellow-red, he slips out from your grasp, as the miles and the age gap slowly lead you down individual paths.

Of course it was for the best, and that particular breakup, little could I have ever known back then, would prove to be the most valuable in preparing me for the rest of my wandering life.

When I moved to university myself I had to say goodbye to the second love of my life: my very best friend Brianne Poole. And she moved me into my dorm room, and we hugged and we cried and we told each other nothing would ever change. And in a million ways, nothing ever did. She still holds one of the biggest pieces of my heart, that girl who saved my life in every possible way. The love of long-distance best friends continues to make me the person I am today.

I’ll skip ahead to the boy next door. He was older, enchanting, sweet. He was nervous and subtle, but also the boy who made the single most romantic gesture towards me (and I just watched Love Actually a few days ago, smiling at the big white Bristol boards that are still tucked into the back of my closet back home… a Christmas declaration of his own). People always say This generation will always remember where they were the day the world’s first black man was elected president! Now every time I see Obama, I think of him. I remember lying on my bed, my tiny 1205D bed, just a few days before his scheduled flight back to the UK, and I remember him telling me exactly how I made him feel. And if we might consider it, how he might be able to make me feel in return, even from 6,000 kilometers away.

That was my first international proposition. I was 18 years old, and I knew it wasn’t the right time for me to be packaging up my heart to ship away across an entire ocean just yet, and I am grateful for realizing that before we ever had the chance to break either of them, but I am more grateful that that boy ever made the overseas option a possibility for me… It certainly helped prepare me for my next long-distance challenge.

A few summers later, I was jumping on my own first international flight. It was the most exciting opportunity for me, and I already had all these tingly feelings I would fall head over heels for Italy. I was so happy to be doing in alone, though I wasn’t naïve enough to assume it would be easy. In fact, I had ended the most serious relationship I had ever had only half a year earlier, thinking it would prepare me for this independent journey abroad (one I already knew to be only the first of many). However, as I should have predicted, those months leading up to my take off left plenty of time to get my heart all wrapped up in someone else. Someone old and then new again. Someone who had some unknown pull, some inexplicable potential that I could never seem to let go off. He made it clear he didn’t want things to end simply because I was flying away for four months.

And even when he flew out to meet me that fateful, classic, romantic afternoon in Paris, and even though we had a pretty outstanding few weeks running around Europe (a place we eventually made our home together) after all of our time apart, that time apart came back to haunt us, and the long-distance thing continued to feel like the impossible. Today that same boy can be found pulling heart strings from the orient. Our newest version, unique unto ourselves, of long-distance love. The same unrealistic potential that won’t seem to fade.

And here we are, in the present, as you could guess: I am about to take flight once more. I have found something wonderful and genuine and great here, and in my own true fashion, I am bidding it adieu in only a few short weeks. Weeks which will surely fly, moments which will pass as quickly but as lovely as the breeze, memories that I already know will dissolve and settle deep within my bones. And then I will once again be gone. Away. Long-distance. Apart. And there is no way of telling if it is any match for the distance or not.

I guess all I’ve really learned from each experience is that if you’re even going to consider the dreaded decision of maintaining something ‘long-distance,’ you have to first believe in the ways of the universe, and trust that she will help you work it out in her own best fit. You have to have faith that it will succeed if it’s meant to. You have to be certain unto yourself that it’s even something worthy of consideration and then maintenance and dedication and loyalty. You have to be with someone you truly trust, completely and absolutely.

But what I can’t seem to distinguish is the difference between needing all of those things long-distance, when surely they are still the most significant and necessary factors of any relationship, no matter how near or far that person is. I know the miles make a difference, but if your heart is in the right place, it really shouldn’t make or break.

And those of you who really know me will be reading this unsettled, worried about the conclusive tone of these paragraphs, and maybe I’ve come to the end of this post, this particular topic, this so-obvious theme, without addressing that single most significant long-distance relationship in my entire young life. A relationship that continues on through to this very day, even though the miles between us now are unimaginable and unattainable.  

I am not ready to write our story. Because I’m not sure I’ll ever feel it appropriate to try to force myself to summarize any of it. Or contain it to paper and pen, keyboard and document. I don’t know how to construct proper sentences to demonstrate what we shared across the miles. I’m scared if I ever truly tried, it would be my biggest disappointment to date.

But since this topic only really exists because of him, because of our long-distance love story, since he is the center of it all (and continues to be, when it comes to anything significant in my life); since the arrival of this tiny gold chain and pendant are what even sparked these thoughts… Maybe I will give it a try to give us a voice.

I have never stopped to put real words together, because I know none of them will do any of it justice. I have barely written soberly on the subject in my own private journal. He didn’t get so much as a Facebook status. I have been selfish. I have wanted to keep our memories for me. And perhaps, I just couldn’t find the words. I am confident in the fact that I knew him in ways that other people were not lucky enough to know him. Yes, I knew his contagious smile, and those huge gorgeous eyes, and that slight southern drawl he acquired, the same way others knew those things. But he and I also knew a long-distance ache. We knew an unwavering desire, an unmistakable pull towards each other. We were fire and gasoline; the most dangerous part of every holiday or summer season, whenever we were in the same country again. Even those fifteen hundred kilometers that separated us the majority of the year were bad news...

And I loved him. Admittedly, in a way that I did not know existed until he was gone. Until he was gone, and this massive piece of me was gone with him.

But I’ve been talking to him, as frequently as ever. When I heard the news three Augusts ago, our latest interaction (which was always unpredictable and sporadic) was so recent that I still had our BBM conversation open. I didn’t know who to talk to, and most of the time I still don’t. I never sat down and talked to anyone about this, or about him. Unless you count the many sad nights after a trip to the Ranch, conversations I can’t remember. I didn’t know who to talk to. I didn’t know who, in my world, would understand. Again, selfish.

But that was the thing: I shared something with him that was almost entirely only ours. It was never fully accepted or understood by his friends, and I never had the chance to truly know his family. It was just me & him, in our own little world. It was more of a sneak-in/sneak-out summer romance that took off on us, and became something we never could have expected, or known how to control. He was my biggest weakness. I’ve had a lot of really great guys in my life, and he was the threat to all of them.

In some ways, I feel he still is.

And I’ve told him this. I kept BBMing him. And I know that sounds crazy, and I feel crazy for it, but he was the only one who I felt would understand. Now, having gotten rid of my blackberry (saving that conversation in my files), I have a note in my new phone that reads over 13,900 words. I could publish a short story of the words I've written to him. But still, here and now, I can’t seem to lace the sentences together properly.

So I close my eyes…

I’m in a car, parked in that abandoned lot, overlooking that baseball field, with my windows down. There is a mild Canadian summer breeze blowing over my face and into my lungs, deep, fulfilling. I don't want to see anything I don't want to talk to anybody I just want to be here with you. Here. Where only a few years ago, you were driving these streets, living in this city. This world. Now I'm not sure where you are. And I want to believe so badly that it is you I feel falling across my face and filling my lungs, my soul. But I don't know if that's possible. What I do know is that wherever you are, I bet you like to hang out in these kinds of places. Old baseball fields, worn out diamonds. Summer skies and peace. I feel calm here. And maybe that is you. Maybe it is you I feel when I feel this calm.

I wish you were here. I wish we were together, in that big empty field, or this empty car. And I am taken back to another time spent together in another car. And that was the best time. No Christmas Eve will ever (ever) beat ours. It was my most romantic evening, to date. What I wouldn't give to be living in those midnight moments, sneaking out to your car, to that abandoned school parking lot, seats down in the back of your station wagon, your Texas compilation mix CD playing on repeat. You knew every word, and you sang them into my soul. You swept my heart away all over again. It was my very first two-step, you spun me in that winter wind storm. And we made promises and we made love and I knew even back then: nothing would come close.

Or the time in your family's minivan parked at our original baseball diamond, the diamond where we laid together on the pitchers mound until the sun came up the next morning, only a couple of weeks after we’d really even met each other. You took me back there the following winter, and you turned to me and told me you weren't afraid anymore, and then you told me three more words. Those three words.

Or the time we spent in your car a few more years later, atop Water Street. And Kenny sang us 'Somewhere with You,' and we both vowed the lyrics to be true and you kissed me, even though you shouldn't have. And I kissed you back, even though I shouldn't have. Because that seemed to be all we ever knew.

I guess, thinking back on it now, it wasn’t so much a love we shared over any distance, but how strong the distance made that love every time we got to be near again. Of course, the past two and a bit years have been the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing you. And those years will keep adding, and I think in some way, our way, this love will also keep getting stronger. You are further away from me now than you have ever been before, but I still feel those memories as clear as day, whenever I let them flow back through my veins. Sometimes, I swear I even feel you right next to me.

But I still miss you, just as strongly as ever before. I miss you like I missed you instantly when you pulled out of my driveway after shedding tears that last day of summer 2008. Like I missed you during first year when we shared a long distance longing for one another. Like I missed you when we broke beneath that, and broke up. Or how I missed you after every single holiday season came to an end you flew back down south. I miss you like I have since the moment I heard the news in Trafalgar Square that August 4^th when my whole world cracked and shattered. I miss you with every fiber of my being, with every inch of my soul, and every ounce of my heart. It's still yours.

I want to send all of my love back home, to everyone else I miss deeply. I hope you all know how much you mean to me, and how that will never waver with this distance. Mostly though, I hope you get to be near the ones you love tonight.

xoko
(this one's for you)