Long Distance Killed Us Slowly
We died in time zones, one missed call at a time.
For three years I loved a man who lived ten and a half hours in the future. When I woke up in Brooklyn, Arjun already knew what kind of day it had been. Twice a year, daylight saving shoved him an hour closer or further, and neither of our governments consulted us.
We met in person first, which everyone says matters. A friend's wedding in Jaipur, December, fairy lights, his cousin's terrible speech. He whispered a joke about the groom's shoes and I laughed into my dupatta and that was that... the whole catastrophe, arranged by a seating chart. I had six days left in India. We spent five of them together and the sixth apologizing for it.
Then I flew home, and we did the thing that everyone warned us about, and that we were certain we would be the exception to.
The early era was easy, or looked like it. Distance runs on adrenaline at first. We had a spreadsheet, I am not joking, an actual shared spreadsheet of overlap hours, his cells shaded green, mine blue, the two usable windows highlighted: my 7 a.m. to his 5:30 p.m., my 10 p.m. to his morning alarm. We watched films with our thumbs hovering over play, counting down from three so the same frame would land in both hemispheres. He mailed me a pharmacy strip of the mints he liked so I would know what his mouth tasted like on ordinary days. I know how that sounds. I kept the wrapper for two years.
We said good morning and good night at the same moment, which sounds romantic and is actually the first small madness of it: he was greeting a woman who was ending her day. I was always his past. He was always my evening. We loved each other sincerely and slightly out of sync, like two people singing the same song a half beat apart, close enough that strangers would clap, far enough that we could hear it.
Nobody warns you about the boring deaths.
Everyone imagines long distance dies of drama: an airport scene, a discovered message, someone weeping in the rain.
Ours died of scheduling.
The calls shrank... Not suddenly. Ninety minutes became an hour became forty, and then came the era of "can we do tomorrow instead," a sentence that costs nothing the first time and everything by the fortieth. His job got serious. My mother got sick, then better, then sick. The overlap windows stayed green and blue in the spreadsheet, but we started spending them tired. There is a particular loneliness in being handed the exhausted rind of a person's day, every day, and handing them yours, and calling the exchange a relationship. I have read a great deal about loneliness since, and nothing describes that specific kind: lonely with a full inbox of love.
The missed calls were the real calendar. One missed call was nothing... We were busy people. But the phone kept its own ledger, and some nights I would scroll it: missed video call, 14 minutes. Missed call. Missed call, and see the fossil record of us, layer by layer... each stratum thinner.
"We'll figure it out" was our lullaby. We sang it across ten and a half hours for three years. One of us would say it and the other would fall asleep believing it, and in the morning, his morning, my midnight, it needed singing again. We never once discussed what figuring it out would actually cost: whose career, whose country, whose mother.
Distance did not kill us in one blow. It taxed us, one missed call at a time, until the love was still there and neither of us could afford it.
Here is the part I have never said in one place.
The distance is not what ended us. The visit is.
Year three, March, I flew to Bengaluru to surprise him. Twenty two hours of travel, a suitcase of his favorite peanut butter, a speech rehearsed over the Atlantic about how I was ready, finally, to talk about moving.
His flatmate let me in.
And I stood in Arjun's actual kitchen, holding my actual suitcase, and I watched a man come through the door and freeze, and here is the thing I need you to understand: he was happy to see me. His face did everything right.
And I felt like a guest.
Not unloved. A guest. The kitchen had a system I did not know. The music playing was music we had never once discussed. There was a whole man here, with plants and inside jokes and a preferred burner on the stove, and I realized with a kind of slow vertigo that I was in love with his voice and his 5:30 p.m. face and the green cells of a spreadsheet, and this person, this entire three dimensional person hanging his helmet on a hook I had never seen, was somebody I knew mostly by broadcast.
He felt it too. I watched him feel it.
We had eleven days and we were courteous for all of them, two diplomats from countries that used to be one country. The pixelated version of us had survived on rations. The real one starved in the same room, over full plates, with nothing to blame.
The breakup call came a month after I flew home, and it was, I say this with no bitterness, the kindest call we had had in a year. Nobody cheated. Nobody shouted. He said, "I love the version of you I invented, and I think you love yours, and they should stay together forever." I laughed... and then I cried so hard the laugh got a second life, and we stayed on the line long past the point of having anything to say, the way you stand at a gate after the flight has been called.
Forty minutes. Our longest call in months.
The ledger closed on a full entry.
Grief after long distance is a strange, unwitnessed thing. Nobody brings you casseroles. Your apartment does not change: he was never in it. There is no side of the bed to avoid, no restaurant that is suddenly haunted. The whole relationship had lived in a device in my pocket, so the device became the graveyard, and I carried it everywhere, because it was also my alarm clock and my bank and my mother's voice. Mourning him meant holding the headstone forty times a day.
Writing is what gave the grief a body. Six months after the call I found a line of mine from our second year, scribbled at 2 a.m. after a missed window: "you are the only person I love in the future tense." I built a poem around it, ugly drafts first, then something true, and on a brave Tuesday I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly to make the whole thing exist outside my phone. It did not win. It did something better: a reader found it and wrote to me, a woman engaged across the Pacific, asking, "Does it end? Please be honest." We wrote back and forth for months. Her story is on a page of writers nobody had heard yet now, and it is better than mine, and I am the person who told her to post it. Somewhere in all that, without noticing the exact day, I stopped writing about him and started writing about love itself, which is how I knew the tide had turned.
People ask if I regret the three years. They expect yes. But he was not a mistake; he was a country I lived in, honestly and at great expense, and no one regrets a country.
Last spring, four years after the call, I finally deleted Bengaluru from the world clock on my phone. I had kept it there the whole time, a little embassy I would not close, his weather under my weather. The phone did not mark the occasion. One tap, and the future was just the future again, nobody living in it ahead of me.
My phone shows one time now, one city, mine.
Sometimes, at 7 a.m., I still do the math anyway.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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