When I was younger, I was really good at loving from afar. It’s one of those things you practice to get worse at, but I only got better. Over the years, I’d get closer and closer, promote myself from classmate to friend, and keep the love farther away, hidden in stories and midnight confessionals to fellow distance-lovers. The profoundest distances are never geographical, I read somewhere.
I realized recently, not entirely without a pleasant sense of nostalgia, that I’ve lost that part of myself. On purpose, of course. This isn’t a coin that slipped out of my pocket and through the cushions of a couch. I tossed it forcefully into the wind. Or, perhaps more accurately, slipped into the slot of a toll booth on my way toward reciprocity.
Eventually, like most people, I got tired of having the person I most wanted dangled in front of me without even attempting to reach out to get her, whoever she was. I learned long ago that loving someone from afar usually keeps you from loving them from nearby.
Now, at the first symptom, I act. I stopped letting those things fester. “Love grows inside like a tumor,” a great song says (Fuck Was I by Jenny Owen Youngs). I pump that sucker with so much radiation that I suddenly find myself attached to a human-sized tumor. Or, you know, I try to, get rejected, and then the tumor’s excised and everyone’s still relatively unharmed. Or the tumor becomes benign and stops growing and I appreciate that it’s there in its friendly way. You’ve either gone through it yourself or have seen enough movies to not need the message repeated by me.
I just wonder if maybe there is something to miss about not acting. About letting a crush develop over months and blossoming into infatuation/self-torture. One of the basest human impulses is nostalgia, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. If your mind wants to highlight the past and edit out some shit, why not. I mean, there are wonderful things about love unrequited: it’s cheap, disease-free, it can last forever.
It’s different, at least. There’s having an entire day made from one simple comment. I’ve been in some pretty lovey-dovey, passionate relationships, and while I’d much rather have the immense joy of constant companionship and having someone to love and hold, a single, seemingly innocuous comment made from a crush can bring unparalleled joy, at least in its ambition. It’s like that little bit of Jewish oil that stretched out for eight days.
In high school, the last girl I let myself love from afar was in one of my classes. And among the many reasons I could give for why I developed feelings for her, I can recall one simple movement. She sat directly behind me and rest her feet on my chair, on that bar between the chair’s back legs and seems to be there only to have some pretty girl rest her feet on. I, of course, knew her legs were there. As suave and debonair as any inexperienced 16-year-old, I slung my arm back over my chair, as if it was a comfortable thing to do. I probably put on that, “I’m so laidback and awesome,” look that 16-year-olds never understand isn’t an actual look. Even as my blood flow tingled to a halt, I was willing to keep it there as long as necessary for that slightest bit of incidental contact. One day, she let her knee fall against my arm, and that’s probably the closest I’ve ever been to amputation. I wouldn’t dare to move. And even if the fact that she didn’t move either now seems like an obvious cue for 16-year-old me to do something, maybe I was happy enough with just that square inch of contact.
So, you know, there’s that. That kind of unrivaled joy in tiny things, and the memory of them. Maybe loving from afar is for the brave, for those who don’t need happy endings or kisses or actual emotional connections or…you know…venereal diseases.
