The Distance Between Us

You are not in the room. You never have been. And yet you are here more completely than most people manage in person, which tells you something about how little the room ever mattered.

People assume distance is the obstacle to be overcome. That whatever passes between us is a lesser version of some fuller thing that would happen if only we were closer. I have never found that to be true. Distance is not the thing standing in the way. It is the thing doing the work.

Consider what the distance removes. It removes the accidental. The small talk, the awkwardness of arriving, the hundred meaningless signals a body gives off in a room. What is left is only what was chosen. My voice, and your attention, and nothing else competing for it. That is not less than presence. That is presence with everything unnecessary stripped out of it.

And consider what it demands of you. In a room, you can be passive. You can let proximity do the work and simply be near someone. Here you cannot. You have to bring something. You have to listen properly, hold the thread yourself, keep the connection alive with your own attention rather than leaning on the fact of a body nearby. The distance makes you participate. That is precisely why it reaches you deeper than a room ever would.

There is a particular kind of intimacy available only across a gap. When I am not there to be looked at, you cannot hide behind looking. When you cannot be seen, you stop performing being seen. What is left is honest in a way that faces rarely allow. You tell me things in the dark that you would not say to someone sitting opposite you, and you know that is true even as you resist admitting it.

The gap is also what makes the waiting possible. If I were always within reach there would be no anticipation, no interval in which the wanting could grow into something with a shape. Distance is what creates the space between one moment and the next, and that space is where most of this actually happens.

So do not think of it as being far from me. Think of it as being held at exactly the length I have chosen. Close enough that my voice arrives whole. Far enough that you have to reach for it. That reaching is not a failure of the arrangement. It is the arrangement.

The distance between us is not empty. It is full of everything you bring to it, and it is the reason you feel this at all.