infinite distance — By Syrah Linsley

art by Lori Fuller

            After years of dating, you recognize my need for distance before I do. You’re quick to notice when I am overdue—my facial expressions slowing, my eyes and lips losing momentum—but I’m thankful you don’t take it personally. Even though time and space apart can be hard for you, you give both to me anyway, knowing I feel loved when you are far enough away that I wouldn’t hear you say I am loved. Remember when you shared the article about distance as a love language? Or when we sat in opposite corners of my living room while reading each other quotes about the necessity of distance in love, marveling at the beauty of the thought, the underappreciated nature of this spatial awareness. How does one study distance, then, become a connoisseur of it? Microscopes will not work, only telescopes. Some things in life are better understood from afar; if you get too close to the star, you will melt or run out of breath. I have been thinking about acceleration, about the inexplicable joy I feel as I curve to merge onto the highway, this trajectory of my movement nearing someone else’s: I feel the beauty of the approach and the mystery of never arriving. We stay in our lanes, in our own vehicles. We near each other, coasting side by side. But if we were to open our doors at that proximity, we might collide, hurting each other and those around us. In childhood, I played a game whose objective was to protect personal space. My cousin called it mon chéri, meaning my honey or my darling: someone closed their eyes in the dark with outstretched arms as the rest of us shifted around the room quietly, avoiding their touch. I’ve heard that most of the universe is composed of empty space even at the atomic level. I’ve also heard that cosmic expansion is accelerating, not slowing down. The average distance between our galaxies is compounding, a gravitational stretch. The universe seems to know something about distance that we may never understand or completely appreciate. When I become overwhelmed by the outer world—by incomprehensible statistics, the daily news, the unending exchange of energies between human beings—I like to remind myself that some things are best approached on the simplicity of the blank page, including each other. Here, let me show you: let’s make a graph. Here is the X axis, and here is the Y. Let’s draw you as a line on the horizontal floor of this graph. Now let’s draw me as a curve, beginning in the upper left quadrant and dropping down toward the lower right, where our lines draw close enough to breathe down each other’s necks but do not touch. Your line and mine point toward the blank space to the right of this graph where everything is future, trajectory, the great unknown. The space between two people and beyond them (let’s not forget) is infinite.

Syrah Linsley holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Recipient of First Place awards from Bennington’s international Young Writers Awards and the Liberal Arts Network for Development, she has also been a finalist for the Annie Dillard Award and Southeast Review’s nonfiction contest as well as longlisted for the international First Pages Prize. Her first published essay is in Hippocampus Magazine. She wakes at 4:00 am to write and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.