How To Love Someone From Far Away: A Field Manual
Collect songs for her. Do not share them with her. The CD with her handwriting on it must stay blank and dusty on your shelf. The guilt you feel when you move it during fevered bursts of cleaning will only bind you to her. This is the plan, at least. Build her a towering monument of music - taller and more precarious than the pile of books and crusted plates and kleenex and one blank CD on your nightstand. Clean your room and think of her in her spaces, rooms full of light and downy fabric, papered with artwork drawn like secrets, dressers populated by baubles she let you touch, tiny things in your fingertips, sanctified with her.
Send him pictures of what you are wearing. Send him pictures when you are beautiful. Send him pictures when are not. Send him pictures of the sunset with palm trees dark against the skyline (look, here is where I am, here is where you are not, is my presence here strange and alien to you?) Send him pictures of your car when it is the last one in the parking lot (I am overwhelmed here when time is slow and terrible, was the day shorter where you are?) Do not caption these photographs. Delete them from your phone as soon as they are sent. This is not a two-sided conversation.
MANUFACTURER'S NOTE: You must love the far-away with a small, enduring love. It must be an ember, not a flame. Flame is too consuming. It will burn out with lack of fuel. You must give the ember just enough to keep it glowing without fanning it into flame. You must tend to the love, but remember the distance it must travel in its poverty. It must be able to survive for weeks on a single word, memory's scraps. Far-away love must be independent and hardy. So must you.
When you arrive at your new home, tell people about her. You must always hold her between yourself and strangers. Assert her reality into a world where she does not exist. Never use her name. The strangers will not know it, and this will only remind you of her absence, of your presence in a world now without her. Say only, "my friend." It should feel wrong to say only this. This wrongness will reassure you. Skeletons haunt us not for fear of bones, but for memory of what moved in their shapes.
Buy cheap plane tickets, an overnight trip with two layovers ending at 2am. Look out the window at the glowing city and imagine that it is home. Dig yourself into his life for forty-eight hours. Pretend his dog remembers you. Memorize his kitchen cabinets so you don't have to ask, like a guest, where the glasses are. In an emergency, ask the roommate, as if you are here to visit him instead. Do not bring your own pillow. Do the dishes. On the drive to the airport, trace the skyline with your eyes to redirect tears. It is rude to pray for flight cancellations, but your fellow travelers will never know.
