Just Because I Haven't Written, Doesn't Mean I Have Nothing to Say
keeping in touch with long-distance friends
I currently have 4 best friends living outside of the city where I live. New York City, Tennessee, and California. This may be a common situation, especially when you have spent all of your 20s in one city, and then into your 30s you stay when people find other paths. It can be difficult to stay connected, especially with all four of them, 3 in different time zones.
I recall the tee shirt my high school best friends made when we graduated and moved on to college, New York City, Florence, Massachusetts, and Philadelphia. We created a shirt with a world map on it and a small picture of each of us connected by a dashed line to our hometown in New Jersey. Underneath in typewriter font, it read:
We are intrepid. We carry on.
A quote from the movie “Elizabethtown” starring Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom. I barely recall it as a kind of Garden State-style philosophical romantic comedy. An eye roll is permitted here, it was 2009. We haven’t all kept in touch over the years, although I have kept in contact with the queer one.
I hope that I can be a good friend from afar. I try to keep up with communication, but even for a writer, it can be hard to find the words.
There is so much communicated through sharing physical space and proximity. It’s hard not to feel that sending a text or a link to a funny video or interesting piece of news is too thin a string to traverse hundreds of miles and honor the depth of a friendship.
How do you express that you are sitting on a bench in the sun and it’s the same bench you sat on with them - and you’re feeling the sun on your back and you miss feeling the sun with them - but you can’t remember what time it is there and if they’re asleep and what if it makes them sad and what if they don’t respond at all? How do you find the words for I miss you and I love you and I’m okay but I’m not okay, but it’s fine and everything’s dumb but also funny and I want to talk to you but I’m scared it’s been too long and I won’t be able to fit everything through the phone screen? What if you have good news that’s minor or bad news that's huge and there’s no time for a phone call but it’s too hard to text it all? How do you say I’m sad that I’m in all the same places we have been and I’m still in the same city but I’m happy that you’re doing something new but why does it feel like everyone leaves?
The coordination of calls and face times and trips and photos - piled on along with all the other responsibilities of communication in 2024 can be overwhelming. Why can’t I just show up at your door? Why aren’t you already next to me? Why does it cost so much time, energy, and money to arrange that?
And yet, it’s always worth it. To hear your voice, or see your face in a photo, and of course to get off the plane, the train, the bus, and wait at your door. The same door, or a door I’ve never seen before.