An apology from a terrible lover

I am not good at long distance. Not because I don’t love deeply, but because I love in temperature. I love in kitchens, in doorframes, in the weight of someone’s arm going slack across my ribs at two in the morning. I love in steam rising from a meal I’m cooking, in clothes abandoned beside the bed that I’ll pick up and neatly fold, in the way someone exhales when they think you’re already asleep. My love has always been spatial. It requires walls, breath, and the accidental brush of skin in a hallway to reassure itself that it is real.

I love in a way where I’ll stay patient through your storms in real time, I won’t fight for I understand why some people resort to biting. I’ll wait for you to come back when you’re ready.

But on a screen, I become theoretical. My voice flattens. My laughter arrives half a second too late. Your face freezes mid-sentence and I am left loving a pixel. There are two versions of me: one made of proximity, the other made of discipline. The first leans into you when you speak, reaches for your hands without thinking, forgets what she was arguing about because your shoulder is warm. The second measures time in time zones. She swallows the ache because it would be inefficient to name it. She learns silence as if it were a moral achievement.

Both are me. Only one feels alive.

When we are apart, I become industrious. I work. I write. I light candles as if they are substitutes for breath. I convince myself that longing is elegant, that restraint is romantic, that discipline is devotion. But at night, the bed becomes geographical. Your side cools too quickly. The sheets hold their shape. My body curls in on itself like punctuation, unfinished.

I am good at ambition. I am good at surviving seasons. I am good at folding myself into smaller versions so that distance doesn’t feel like absence. What I am not good at is loving what I cannot touch. Long distance requires faith… faith that silence between calls is not erosion, that absence is not rehearsal for leaving. I have faith. What I lack is insulation.

When you are here, love feels almost embarrassingly simple. We can coexist. We can banter about nothing. I can fit my whole face under your earlobe and you can feel my presence. The world shrinks to the size of a bedroom. It behaves. When you are gone, love becomes conceptual. I narrate my own emotions so they do not spill. I examine the distance for cracks that may not exist. Overthinking becomes a second career.

There is something quietly humiliating about missing someone who is not physically absent, only geographically displaced. About craving the ordinary- your mug, your shadow moving across the wall, the sound of the door knob turning. I realize then that love, for me, is not made up of grand gestures but repetition. It is the everyday choreography of shared space.

I do not split because I am inconsistent. I split because my body knows what my mind tries to rationalize: love is not only emotional. It is tactile. It is atmospheric. It is built in presence.

And still, I tried. Because somewhere between the girl who reaches for you in her sleep and the woman who calculates flights instead of feelings, there is someone learning how to love across absence without abandoning herself in it.

I am not good at long distance.

But perhaps love is not about being good at it. Perhaps it is about admitting that I am two people… one made of touch, one made of endurance and hoping they can coexist without tearing each other apart.

Ocean Vuong once wrote that the most beautiful part of the body is where it’s headed. I think about that when I board planes. When I land somewhere that isn’t you. When I rehearse patience like it’s a virtue.