i wish staying in touch hurt less

there’s no way this is that difficult, YEAH we got this i love you so much, i love YOU so much, we’ll figure it out, have a good class!!!!! we’ll text we’ll find a time and we’ll fucking be there

there is a viscerally quiet heartbreak in distance, visceral separately in its quiet and in its heartbreak. i wait by the phone like in a movie, double-triple-check that we aren’t mixing up the time zones again. forgiveness tastes different to me when i can’t see it in your eyes - less tangible, less sweet. there is an unease that lingers on my shoulders where your head would’ve been, the weight of that absence like a coat too thin in the winter cold. it stings. i wait, i walk to the next bench. the wifi isn’t better there. you have a life outside mine the same way i have a life outside yours, but the whiplash of telling you about my life rather than mine being you is something i’m not ready to feel.

it’s so good to hear your voice, yeah i MISS YOU SO MUCH, oh my god, i miss you too

it’s splotchy. the cold, my eyes, the signal. i feel like a child’s shadow in a painting of the snow. you send me photos of a new life with new people in new places in new clothes. there’s a boy you don’t like back, you’ve found a favorite tea shop, classes are classes. i smile so you can hear it in my voice. i tell you about me. she’s happy, she’s here, she’s finding people to love and a person to be. she misses you, though. really.

hey friend could we go 30 earlier? got another thing to get to. seven your time. talk soon.

i stare at the sky while you tell me about work. i listen like it’ll kill me not to, grasp the phone like it’ll bring you closer. i close my eyes. i’m running out of the pistachios you bought me. you say you want to buy me more. i tell you it’s okay. i know it’s different like this, here and now in this forced purgatory of a connection. your cooking isn’t my dinner and my cooking isn’t yours. i sent you a card. it was two weeks late. you tell me every time i call that i should tell you about the bad things with the good things. i tell you a swelled mosquito bite is the worst it’s been. you send me an article on skeeter syndrome. i say i don’t have a fever, actually. but thank you.

hello??? i love when you call like this out of the blue. i love talking to you!!! how is it how’re you

we can’t do this so far away. you’re too close to it all, you know it so well, you live it so thoroughly. i know you drink away the work-life balance and think i don’t need to know. i know the nicotine doesn’t help. i know you know that. i call you from a moonlit picnic table and say that i can’t wait to hear how you’re doing. you say you’re getting pizza later, that it’s strategic, not friendly. i remind you not to get too lost in the strategy. you remind me it saves lives. i remind myself about how you told me you vape in your sleep, us & a friend & a haphazardly pitched tent playing cards under a piece of the night sky that i’m so far away from now. how much does it matter that we’re under the same stars if your smoke obscures them? i love you so much. i worry.

oh, you know. it’s hell. the usual, but we persist or something, right? right. right.

i want to fix it. i’ve always been the type. there’s nothing i can do this time.

love you. miss you every single day. take care of yourself for me, okay?

i hang up and think about how i’ll spend the rest of my life missing people. i tell myself i have too much homework to think about missing people. i tell myself it’s okay, that december isn’t far. the wind stings. i breathe it in. i do homework.

love you too. call soon.