On Long(ing) Distance
Dear Matt,
Our long distance, our longing distance. We go along a long way, our longing way. Alonging this distance.
We are fundamentally relational creatures, but how do we care for one another? How do we acknowledge and make space for our radical contingency? Especially across distance: how can we maintain the strength of our “we”, our covalent bonding “with” across width? Can I write my way a little bit closer to you?
I’m writing this on my plane ride back to the states. I’m writing this as I get closer to you, but I know I’m not closing the gap entirely. You’ve moved to another state now, after all. I’m coming a little bit closer but not close enough: this asymptotic chase only makes my heart hungrier to connect again.
These days I am experiencing long distance as a geographic pang. A landscape of lack. I cannot gather our “together”. There is only an accumulation of missing you, a mostly colorless state. I cannot fill it. I am — we are — an ache. Language is a constant mediator, playing third wheel as I text you, listen to your voicemails, pen you love letters.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen you last.
I want to make you — us — last.
In the space of our longing distance, I wrote a chapbook documenting our care for each other — the materiality of our memory work, fantasy, and virtual co-presence. That book — WITH— just came out from Ghost City Press. I held a launch event in a gallery in Berlin, where I was living for the summer. The room was filled with love and trust, from friends and strangers who came from all over the world. But something about the launch still felt wrong: you weren’t there.
That same week in Berlin, I attended a lecture on care by Lisa Baraitser. At one point, she cited Judith Butler, who is, as you know, one of the many-gendered mothers of my heart: “Dependency fundamentally defines us… we invariably lean toward and on each other, and it is impossible to think about either of us without the other.” It is impossible to think about either of us without the other — listen & listen to that again. That phrase is tucked in my heart now, words to carry you in me, to caress you at any moment. The pain of it is that our “us” is impossibly split. If I had encountered that quotation earlier, it would have doubtless become an epigraph for my chapbook, a guiding light for my searching heart.
Our imprints on each other — lingering resonances like tapered harmonics, threading across the thousands of miles. Is it enough to count the days, the weeks, the months between/amongst us, to make a muddled accumulation like Catullus’s kisses? Let us live and let us love, let us continue our heart correspondences, let us make this distance our dance.
With love,
Noah
