What’s the strangest thing? I can’t even tell if I love them or not. I think I do. or rather, I want to. From this distance, though, it’s hard to tell. They aren’t even that far — a couple hours, maybe a flight and a couple time zones.
However, the distance between us feels larger than that. It’s as if they live in a separate universe that I am only allowed to visit through texts, late-night conversations, and rare pictures that I zoom into the background wondering if it brings me closer to them.
When we speak, it feels like something clicks. It feels like they understand me in a quiet deep way that no one else does. But then the messages end. And they disappear back to their life, their city, their favourite food that I will never get to smell, and the friends I will never get to meet.
How would you know?
How would you love someone whose laughter you have never heard resonate in the same space? How would you trust a feeling that exists only between screens and during long silences punctuated by unstable signals?
I recall some days, being full of them. Also being full of thoughts of them, memories that we did not even get to make.
And then other days, feeling nothing at all. Not even a flicker. Like someone who was a dream that I barely remember waking up from.
Maybe love needs, or wants, more than imagination. Maybe it needs presence
