We are...we say...
Every time I sit down to check my email I find myself inside a conversation that spans miles and miles of both land and time. We may no longer live in the same country, but we are forever tied together, we are a part of each other's lives. We end discussions of politics and culture and well, anything with two words, "love you" and we always have. This sentiment that we never expressed when we saw each other every day has become a regular part of our discourse. Is this because of the distance?
Or is it because we are older now? Because we have more of a sense of our mortality? Our friends and our families, its been a rough few years. Almost bordering on cruel and unfair. Life has finally taught us the one lesson worth learning that our time here is short so love hard and love often.
Maybe it is a little bit of both.
Knowing then what we know now probably wouldn't have changed our relationships to the point where we could have said, on a regular basis, love you, but, I don't know. Maybe it would have. Maybe we would have spent more time together. Listened to each other a little harder. Gotten caught up in the tedious and somehow magical trainspotting of each other. I mean, what did we do with all that time we had when we were never more than a mile away from each other? Why can't I remember what your favorite food was? Or better yet, what you were studying every time I saw you with a book?
In Camus' The Plague the characters who find themselves seperated from their loved ones can't help but chastise themselves for not knowing what their lovers did in those hours they were not together. Why is it that we can never remember to wonder those things when people are there? are close at hand? And why do we always wait until someone is half way across the globe to be able to express the exactness of our feeling for them?