Love and Distance

I’ve been in a love for 4 years which I can only describe as a love in transit.  A slow, often painful pilgrimage to a promised land which often seems more dream than reality.  Distance, whether in platonic or romantic relationships, places us in such transit – a path in between one dream and another, one reality and another, one life and another.  In these in-between worlds, one finds the cathedrals and graveyards of the heart.  In these in-between worlds, love is either consecrated or killed.

Love in transit requires tremendous faith, faith straddling the borders of insanity:

Faith in yourself, that you can navigate your paradox of emotions, that you can respond rationally rather than emotionally in cases where distrust and jealousy may arise, and emotionally rather than rationally when rationality would have you end everything;

Faith in your lover, to do the same;

Faith in the path, even as the path denies you each other’s presence time and again, even as friends and strangers along the path insult your love, qualifying and quantifying something they have neither seen nor heard nor felt, even as the path wears your soles and souls, even as the summit of one hill reveals still more hills;

Faith in your lover, to be honest about her feelings, to offer what support she can, to recognize and avoid temptations, to communicate both the spectacular and mundane so that you might share in each other’s lives, to trust you not blindly but with the blinding light of love in her eyes;

Faith in yourself, to do the same.

I would love to say my faith were always so adamantine, that my faith were immovable as a mountain.  Often, I feel it is, but other days my faith wavers in the wind as a reed.  Even on the good days, I feel that each moment I am denied my love is a moment wrestled with despair.

One thing I’ve learned – the degrees of separation between despair and exaltation are minute and pliable.  In any moment each can wrest the soul from its stillness and into torrid thrashing, as the gnawing numbness of loneliness clashes with the love-cries of a soul pregnant with earthen joy.

I use the word torrid deliberately – because to love in such a way is a fever-induced madness.  To truly love we must suffer such madness.  And to truly have faith we must be madly in love not only in all we are given, but in all we are denied. 

I struggle to conclude these thoughts, because just as a traveler’s journal cannot end until the journey is completed, this love in transit, while in its fourth year, must cover still more time and distance before this chapter can be reasonably concluded.  So tonight I end here, and offer these words as I offer my life – as a footnote in that global love story we call living.  

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