To add to my list of things I've never done, I've never dated anyone who lives 1200 miles away. To further complicate that, I've never fallen in love with and agreed to be monogamous (which I absolutely want... I want only for my focus to be on her) with anyone 1200 miles away. Suffice it to say, this struggle is a new struggle, and it's getting a bit more strugglier for me (well, for both of us but I don't want to speak for her). Being far away means that I can't hug her whenever I want, means I can't cart things around for her, pretend to be butch enough to do car maintenance (I can't change your oil but I sure can wash it!), sneak food when she is trying to cook. She can't yell at me for leaving a solitary dirty sock laying in the middle of the living room floor, or for having four half drunken Diet Dr. Pepper cans in each room. We can't grapple for couch space under the weight of a million animals, and that grappling can't turn into something a little more serious and a lot more fun. We can't do good sex together (and we do *really* good sex together), and I can't polish her new boots whenever they get a scuff. We don't get to go out and about with our friends whenever we want, discovering new restaurants and maybe getting a little tipsy. I don't get to carry a perma-bruise, the marks she leaves with her teeth, hands, toys, and she doesn't get to be given service the way she deserves to be.
What we do have is love. Lots and lots of love. At least once a day one of us asks the other how much we love them. I almost always respond with a gif of a t-rex doing his best to extend his arms out and she always responds with beautiful flowery language that makes my heart burst. We do have a long distance dynamic. I have rules to follow (gahhhh not being allowed to speed is hard!), and she ensures that her property is taking care of herself. We send pictures. Lots of pictures. Have I mentioned we have love? We have phone bills that must be tens of pages long. For the last 10+ of this phone plan, my calls for the month on each bill could be contained within about an inch of the bill. Now... it's several pages. We have video chat. We have each others clothes (okay... she got my favorite hoodie AND my favorite Hufflepuff t-shirt and I love seeing her in both). We own matching undies. There are cards and packages sent. We've had fights and we've made up. Despite being 1200 miles away, we have a fairly normal relationship (as normal as she and I will ever get).
I'm aching for you tonight. This January has been the longest year ever and it feels like we'll never reach Valentines Day weekend. I can't wait to be in each others arms, tangled in each others bodies, sitting at her feet where I belong.
Now, because I'm sappy and obsessed with them, I leave you with a poem by Andrea Gibson, who always manages to say what I need to say but can't.
Wasabi
The plan was to play hard to get, that’s right.
I wasn’t just gonna go giving myself away. I’m no easy catch.
Can you really see me in fishnets?
No.
I always find myself slippin’ out the holes, swimmin’ back out to sea.
I’d never been anybody’s sushi roll.
But she, has lips like wasabi.
My eyes water every time we kiss.
Makes me wish we had a porch swing and a little home.
Makes me wish I could (write)/right wrongs, instead of poems.
The heart is a bullet that’s terrified of blood.
Love is a windshield wiper in a hurricane; nothing is ever clear.
You mistake her name for the moon, mistake porchlights for the stars and sometimes they are.
Her constalliations lead me home, ten thousand shades of open.
And if there’s one thing in this world I’ve ever known for sure it’s that this girl is gonna crush me like a small bug.
Leave me so frickin’ broken there’ll be body bags beneath my eyes from night’s I cried so hard
the stars died, but I’m like, go ahead.
I’m all yours.
I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean during a lightning storm ‘cause I’d rather be left for dead than left to wonder what thunder sounds like.
I’m not lookin’ for someone who can save me.
Life rafts might keep you afloat but they rarely get you anywhere and I’ve got places I wanna go.
So break me in two, peel back my rib cage and cover every page of my heart with love poems
you will burn someday.
The most fertile lands were built by the hands of volcanoes,
And I wanna know what grows beneath the drone of Hallmark and roses.
I want your goodbye to feel like explosives,
Your lips, a burning building without fire escapes.
Your hips the gates of hell if I know if heaven exists,
But this will do just fine.
I wanna feel you like lifelines on the palms of Jesus when the nails went through is that really, really creepy?
Just in case it is, let me also say I want you sleepy-eyed in the morning,
Waking at my side like a warm summer sky born from so much softness the horizon cries every time nightfall comes to take you.
Let me also say I wanna make you sandwiches,
And soup,
And peanut butter cookies.
Though, the truth is peanut butter is actually really bad for you ‘cause they grow peanuts in old cotton fields to clean the toxins out of the soil.
But hey, you like peanutbutter and I like you.
Let me also say I’ve never seen anything more gorgeous than you were that night.
The moon, bending through the window blinds,
I told time by the light casting shadows across your face while you told me this story:
“My grandparents were married for 63 years.
On the day my grandfather died he laid in bed and said nothing
but “love, love, love love”
then he puckered his lips and kissed my grandmother for the last time.”
Love, love, love, love is like sunshine:
Sometimes you have to get burned to know you were there.
I wanna know that I’m here, every single part of me,
My heart, open as the river’s eyes the first time it sees the ocean.
My god, look at those waves!
Listen to that thundering tide.
Can you imagine anything more frightening?
Can you imagine anything
More
Alive?
