Loving someone can be challenging enough. Loving someone who lives far away? That’s a whole different ballgame. Because loving someone who lives far away means you’re living in all three dimensions: past, present, and future. Your past memories of this person fuel you to invest your present thoughts into them and make plans to meet again in the future.
The longing you feel when you’re not around them is a joyful aching, a pain you relish in. You get lost in the flood of thoughts of you two together. You fall into a daze of imagining the next time you get to have that again.
But this can also disconnect you from your present moment and situation, cut you off from your immediate surroundings because you’re thinking of a time that doesn’t exist right now.
Not until you’re finally together again do you throw yourself back into the present. No more disconnecting, no more disengaging. You’re in fully again. You savor each and every single moment, each kiss and each embrace. The mornings spent in bed with the sun pouring over your bodies remind you of a time long ago, one where responsibilities didn’t exist. You lay there as you hold each other and think, “Uh oh. I’m in trouble.???
Because when you fall you tend to fall hard fast. No matter the deadline, you go through the motions each time. You put off the thought of the painful inevitable, the goodbye that’s to come until you absolutely have to face the music. Every day seems to pass by quicker than the last, and before you know it, the time for departure makes its unwelcome arrival.
Each time you say goodbye, a piece of your heart stays with them. Every time you turn away, you entrust them with a bit more of your soul; will they be careful with it?
The longer you’re apart, the more the questions begin to invade your mind. As much as you enjoy the “being together when we’re together??? the thing, how long until your heart can’t take it anymore? How long until no longer enjoy the times when you’re not together? At what point do choices have to be made? No one prescribed a correct amount of time. No one wrote the rules for this. Everyone’s answer is different. So you find yourself continuing things as long as you possibly can because everyone’s answer is different.
As it’s comfortable there’s no reason to end it. As long as your needs are being met. As long as you don’t have to have to reach that point yet; the point at which your needs change (which they are subject to), and you plunge into building a life together, one that’s not a conveyor belt of hellos and goodbyes.