For a while, a lawyer from France had written; now a builder of beautiful things in the US.(Long distance relationships have never been easier than now: in our age of email and Skype and inexpensive air-travel (also, I’m Singaporean, I fly in and out of Changi. I think anything within a 7 hour flight radius is short, an easy weekend trip.) plenty of couples manage it just fine. I think I even slightly prefer it — the independence of intellects engaged in their own meaningful work, and the preserved integrity of personal space and will, but also sustained belief in a shared work, the work of your relationship, and seasonal, mutual election. No, it isn’t geography, it’s timing.)
(If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well. It were done quickly.)
To be written to by someone who writes well and prizes emotional honesty, and to find yourself responding readily, to feel words blossoming again, the luminous lines tumbling from your fingertips, spilling out, running ahead of you, like Ariadne’s thread — we trace our way towards the heart of this emotional labyrinth — that is a joy, a true pleasure. Perhaps my best genre has always been the letter, deeply private yet a song for another, attuned to their words. And I would have thought once that was enough, regardless of anything coming (or not) of it, who am I to refuse another writer, could I not simply take my happiness from exchange with another, and if it leads to more one day then come what may, but couldn’t I write for the simple sake of writing, because I always have?
But I think to myself this is impossible: I don’t have energy, that emotional extravagance I had once I’m losing (oh hell, I want to be that woman again.) And what good comes of it to him or me, what sustains the writing? To keep writing with the expectation of possible romance, and writing in a way where we continue to encourage and feed this illusion of falling in love? That’s dangerous and foolish, feelings based on mutual fantasy ungrounded in physical reality, and setting everyone up for a painful eventual disillusionment. Why then should I give him hope or him me? And so I shrink again from it all.
TY says the other day about having courage to do difficult things: “Some particular instantiations really are a waste of time, even if one holds to the general principle.” And the deadliness of submission to a general theory of living, I haven’t forgotten, because Sayers is so wise.
And yet and yet each day I crave this unknown touch, the untasted salt of his skin, the sunlight of a smile, the imagined, probing heat.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird