About Unwritten

Lately I’ve been learning that distance isn’t just space. It’s time. It’s the six, seven, eight hours where I’m asleep and something is happening to the people I love and I don’t even know it yet. It’s finding out late. It’s finding out after.

My mother was admitted to the hospital a few weeks ago, and there was nothing I could physically do about it. Just a screen, and trust that family back home can handle it.

I also found out my best friend since I was 13 has been diagnosed and is battling an illness. I wasn’t there when he got the news. I wasn’t there to exist in the same room so he didn’t have to go through it alone. He was there throughout my entire life. I found out through a message too. I keep finding out through messages.

There’s a specific kind of helplessness in loving people from a distance. Nobody’s filming it. It’s quiet. It’s checking your phone too many times. It’s doing the mental math of time zones before you even say good morning. It’s missing birthdays, weddings, the Sunday family lunches that don’t make headlines but somehow add up to a whole life you weren’t present for.

People love to say distance doesn’t matter if the relationship is strong enough. I think that’s a kind thing to say and an incomplete one.

I’m not writing this because I have an answer. I don’t have a neat ending or a lesson wrapped in a bow. I’m writing this because I needed to put it somewhere outside of my own head, where it’s been looping for days.

I know there’s an end of this tunnel. I know my mother is recovering, and my friend will fight, and Paris will eventually feel less like a stranger’s apartment and more like mine. I know all of that, logically.

I’m just not there yet. I’m still in the middle of it, still doing the math of distance and guilt and helplessness, and the other aspects of my life that require my attention.

But I wanted to say it plainly, for once, instead of around it: this is hard. Genuinely, unglamorously hard. And I’m just trying to get through it, one day, one message, one phone call at a time, until I’m standing on the other side of all of this and can look back instead of through.